How to customize an individual axis tick

[hburke012]

How do I format the position of an axis tick like the '60 yrs' in the attached picture? I can't find anything that helps.

[martin.R]

I suspect that the "yrs" is an annotation (e.g. via https://ggplot2.tidyverse.org/reference/annotate.html), rather than an axis tick of anything like that, but I could be completely wrong.

[hburke012]

When I try and write it in as an annotation, it can only go as far left as the lowest X value in the data set, which is not far enough over to be continuous with the axis tick label

[martin.R]

Good point.

You are unlikely to be able to recreate many 538 plots straight out of the box. They apply a lot of customisation and I believe that they keep the code private.

You could play around with gridExtra::grid.text() or ggpubr::text_grob() or similar.

[andresrcs]

If you can't find a better solution, you could manually modify the scale like in this example.
Note: Please make your questions providing a REPRoducible EXample (reprex) like the one below.

library(tidyverse)
set.seed(1)
df <- data.frame(year = seq(1950, 2010, 10),
                 value = rnorm(7))

df %>% 
    ggplot(aes(year, value)) +
    geom_line() +
    scale_x_continuous(breaks = seq(1950, 2010, 10),
                       labels =str_replace(as.character(df$year), "^\\d{2}(?!(5|0))", "'")) +
    theme_minimal()

^{Created on 2019-09-12 by the reprex package (v0.3.0.9000)}