Presidential preferences

[steuard]

patrissimo recently pointed to the current SelectSmart Presidential Candidate selector. I never know how much to trust automated candidate matching tools like this (or, for example, how sensitive they are to minor changes in my stated preferences), but it can at least be one starting point. A few of my top results, omitting people who aren't actually running:

1.	Theoretical Ideal Candidate	(100%)
2.	Barack Obama	(84%)
3.	Dennis Kucinich	(83%)
6.	Joseph Biden	(77%)
7.	Hillary Clinton	(77%)
10.	Christopher Dodd	(73%)
11.	John Edwards	(68%)

I'm glad to see that my fondness for Obama isn't just loyalty to my old state senator. Al Gore would be just behind Hillary at 73%, my highest ranking Republican candidate was Ron Paul at 49%, and my highest ranking actually serious Republican candidate was Giuliani at 40%. A former Green party candidate (Alan Augustson) got 79%, but the only remaining Green (Elaine Brown) ranked down at 38% (probably because she didn't give answers to most questions in the survey).

For the record, some of these results do seem to be pretty sensitive to small variations in one's answers. For the numbers above, I was careful to select either "high" or "low" importance for each issue (since those seem to be the only two options). But when I originally left the importance setting for a few issues undefined (the slider appeared in a middle position that wasn't actually an option once you moved it), Obama had 83%, Kucinich had 82%, and Biden and Clinton were down with Dodd at 73%. So even just changing the priority of a handful of answers can lead to changes of a few percent (though the order remained pretty much the same for me).

Comments

[steuard.livejournal.com]

There's a popular philosophy in survey design which says that one should never give an odd number of choices, because people will tend to mindlessly default to the middle "no opinion" position. I think that's a good idea, but I do generally prefer four choices to two! (And in any case, if middle isn't an option then they really shouldn't give a default state that looks like it is!)