My own tuppence: I think that Great Debates (which includes “politics”) is about debatable issues (presumably those that are not resolvable by factual answers.) There certainly are partisan discussions, but they are debates/discussions.
The Election forum does include similar discussions, but also covers IMHO-type comments related to elections (conversations rather than discussions.)
Is there some degree of overlap? Sure. But we’ve always had overlap, by the nature of our forums. We don’t think of that as necessarily a bad thing. When we started these boards, the first inclination was to have boards by academic topic: physics/chemistry, social sciences, biology, literature and language, etc. We dropped that really quickly because most of Cecil’s columns don’t neatly fit into such categories. Instead, we organized based on the type of discussion:
- Questions with factual answers: General Questions
- Questions that can be debated forever: Great Debates
- Comments and socialization (before Facebook): MPSIMS
- Responses to Cecil’s Columns: Comments on Cecil’s Columns
Over time, we split off IMHO from MPSIMS, to allow a forum just for spouting opinions, but that was still based on the type of conversation/discussion rather than the topic/subject.
We deviated from this pattern when we added Cafe Society because there were so many question on arts and entertainment. We recognized that there would be overlap, and some confusion about what goes where; we dealt with it. By now, people have become used to the distinction and we don’t have confusion much anymore.
Our second deviation from the pattern was to add the Games forum, because Cafe Society was being swamped with games (and there was general feeling that sports wasn’t “arts & entertainment”.) Again, there was some initial confusion, but it’s settled out over the years. And that confusion was minor compared to the convenience for most readers, most of the time. E.g., people who want to find a discussion about the Chicago Cubs don’t need to scroll through pages of movies and music.
The third deviation (i.e., forum based on topic rather than type of discussion) was the Elections forum. We originally thought it would just be opened when US elections were looming, but we’ve left it open all the time (I guess elections are always looming.) Yes, there is some overlap and confusion about which post goes where, but that seems a minor annoyance compared to the general convenience for most readers (viz., people who want to find a discussion about theology don’t need to scroll through pages and pages of election-related froth.)
So, my vote would be to leave things as they are.