There was an email making rounds here at work this morning that linked to this USA Today quiz on how your views match up to the various presidential candidates. Its only 11 questions, but still pretty interesting.
Initially, my top three results were: Clinton (!), Richardson, and Romney. Then I noticed the little bar on the side where you can “weigh the issues to change results”, which lets you place more or less importance on a particular issue. After I got done moving that around a little, my top three changed to: Richardson, Romney, and Duncan Hunter, whom I’ve never even heard of. Anyway, I thought it was pretty neat. I’d be interested to see some other Dopers’ results.
As near as I can tell, Obama is fourth and McCain is Fifth. I guess this is about what I expected (with the exception of McCain, he’s higher than I thought).
Before I noticed the sliders, it was Gravel/McCain/Romney. Afterwards, it was Gravel/Kucinich/Giuliani. I’d not heard much about Gravel, so I’ll look into him and see what he has say, but I don’t really put a lot of stock in this quiz (even less than the average 11-question online quiz deserves, I’d say).
As a civil libertarian whose economic views can best be summed up as “ambivalent”, this quiz didn’t touch on many of the things I consider most important, and didn’t let me respond as I would have liked on most of the questions. For example, take the same-sex marriage question; my answer would be that the government should have nothing to do with marriage at all. If it is absolutely necessary for it to involve itself in declarations of love between people (fun fact: it isn’t), then it should treat all such declarations equally, but the question presupposes the condition. The only questions that acknowledged the possibility of saying to hell with the current standard were the ones about tax reform.
ETA: The reason for my above rambling is sort of a sub-poll…did anyone else find the quiz’s question selection to be way off base in determining what you want in a candidate?
