Template talk:United States Senate election, 2006

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[edit] On the Changes

1. First and foremost, the styles across this table were a mess. The HTML attributes align and valign are deprecated, use CSS styles text-align and vertical-align, respectively, in their places. Second, there is no need for redundant styles (text-align: right in the table tag will be inherited by all subordinate tags).
2. There is no need to include the third parties. First of all, who exactly chose the third parties to be listed? The "Socialist Workers Party", according to its own article, has a few hundred members. The "Independence Party" is only represented in a handful of states. And the Libertarian party prefers to use the color yellow when included with other parties that use blue. Second, they have not won SEATS which is important for the senate race. Including the third parties is just extraneous information. Either lump their popular votes under "Independent" or create a SINGLE additional category called "Other Parties".

—Kbolino 01:27, 10 November 2006 (UTC)

I'd roll them into "Other parties" myself. Independent campaigns and third party campaigns are different beasts entirely. Even the smallest third party has more support than most independent campaigns. (Outside of Lieberman and Sanders of course). --Bobblehead 01:56, 10 November 2006 (UTC)

The template was a direct analogue of Template:United States Senate election, 2004. Your edit has made the table, in Firefox at least, much less pleasing to the eye than the original incarnation, ignoring the removal of the third parties. Also, the current setup of the table implies that no candidate who was not a Democrat, Republican or Independent won any votes at all, which is patently false. —Cuiviénen 18:47, 11 November 2006 (UTC)

Let me say that I edit WP in Firefox, and while the table skews somewhat unpleasantly below 1024x768 (it is still quite readable, however) it looks a good deal more professional than its previous incarnation (personally, I would ditch the color bars on the side). Some things I focused on while editing it included the deprecated and disarrayed styles, the inconsistent row widths (for rows that held the same type of data), the random color choice, the inconsistent use of boldface in the headings, and finally the use of the hyphen where a minus was appropriate. In my opinion, propriety and professionalism are more important than stylistic vanity. As for the third parties, you are correct in reading the implication, but I already noted this in the comment to which you replied. I ought to know they got votes; I voted for one! But I am also a realist: they didn't win seats. They didn't even lose seats, as they had none to begin with. As such, I feel it is more than fair to just lump them all in one category. But there was no popular vote data in the table when I edited it, so I was not inclined to create such a category at that time. HOWEVER: I am not disinclined to someone replacing all of the third parties for which data is available in the context of the new table format. I am disinclined to the use of those peculiar templates for the color bars, however (e.g. Template:American politics/party colours/Republican/row) —Kbolino 02:37, 12 November 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Popular vote statistics, vandalism fix

I added some popular vote results (unofficial) from US election atlas. I combined all non-Republican/non-Democrat votes to make them 'Independent' votes. The source for the results can be found at http://www.uselectionatlas.org/RESULTS/national.php?year=2006&off=3&f=0

I also corrected some vandalism that had the Democrats losing and GOP picking up 6 seats, which clearly didn't happen. For the purposes of the table and vote statistics I added, Bernie Sanders and Joe Lieberman are counted as Independents. I realize this isn't wholly accurate given that Lieberman is going back to being a Democrat, but he did run and campaign as an Independent in Connecticut against Democrat Ned Lamont. Whoblitzell 21:34, 12 November 2006 (UTC)