No big surprises, really. I’m slightly amused that Trump scored so highly, but then again, the main reason I don’t like Trump is that he’s a massive arsehole, and there wasn’t really a question for that. Looking at his actual policy positions, he’s actually (for a Republican candidate, at least) surprisingly liberal in some areas.
Were Trump smart enough to actually mount a campaign, he could take a few pages from Huey Long and sweep the Republican caucus without a problem. He’d even get a fair number of Democratic votes by campaigning on the issues and staking out a position between Clinton and Sanders on his left and the Charismatic Republigelicals on his right.
I can almost see it: A million or more Stanley Kowalskis, feeling disenfranchised and lost, drawn to “Every Man A King” and a guy who can give every rotten petty thing in their lives a good punch in the nose. He’d have people going right down to the wire, and I can’t guarantee that version of Trump would lose.
I’m happy we don’t have that Trump. I’m happy we have the Trump who runs casinos into the ground.
If only! If Trump actually campaigned as a Huey Long (who we have to remember was to the left of FDR), I would be supporting him in a heartbeat. He’d actually be a Bernie Sanders who could connect to the American working and lower middle classes instead of being like Gene McCarthy, George McGovern, John Anderson, Gary Hart, and Howard Dean, the candidate of the college campuses and SWPLs. The left needs a candidate who the people feel can actually give the damn moneygrubbing fatcats of Wall Street a bloody nose.
OK, now I’m really wondering how they’re calculating their match percentages. If BobLibDem and wolfpup are both a 98% match for Sanders, then that should mean that their views are at most 4% different from each other, and hence that their scores for any other candidate should differ by at most four percentage points. Yet wolfpup’s match to Kasich is a whopping 35 percentage points higher than BobLibDem’s.
They seem to give credit for similar answers. If you click through to the analysis for a specific candidate they show both matches and similar answers. Many of the candidates answers are classified as the more nuanced options other than strict yes or no. That at least opens the options of getting very similar scores on a candidate or two despite entering different answers. Those different answers then produce a different score when comparing to other candidates that are only similar to one of the different responses.
87% Hillary Clinton
86% Bernie Sanders
75% John Kasich
72% Mike Huckabee
69% Jeb Bush
63% Donald Trump :eek:
60% Ben Carson
59% Ted Cruz :eek:
53% Rand Paul
Your political beliefs would be considered moderately Authoritarian on an ideological scale, meaning you tend to believe it is the government’s role to provide stability, equality, and opportunity for its citizens.
Sounds about right, although I’ve always understood authoritarian to be a bad thing.
That’s because they’re using the word like an anti-government extremist would use it, to mean literally everyone who thinks government should play an active role in maintaining a just and free society. Mostly, people use it to refer to those who think government should utterly control every aspect or most aspects of society, like Stalin or Hitler did, and there are very few of those left around.
They could try to defend it as a technical term, but then they’d be wrong: Political scientists use it in a way closer to the common definition, with some maintaining the old authoritarian/totalitarian distinction left over from the Cold War (as in, “our dictators are better than their dictators”) but none who would seriously describe Clinton or Bush as authoritarian.
It’s not really telling me anything though. Most candidates will qualify their positions on these subjects leaving plenty of room in the middle to agree with. In reality most of them have either a personal or political desire to act more toward the extremes.
“Agreed most with”:
[ul]
[li]Sanders, Ted and Jeb on science (huh…)[/li][li]Sanders on education, environment, economics[/li][li]Clinton on healthcare, most social and domestic policy issues, foreign policy[/li][li]Jindal on immigration[/li][li]Nobody on electoral issues (probably because I did a write-in for the question on IDs)[/li][/ul]
Prior tests put me as near-left-of-center.
My high Huckabee score probably reflects that there are some aspects of his positions I find complete deal-breakers (SOCAS [and within that, Reproductive Choice and Marriage Equality], UN, AGW) but others are tolerable and even supported, rather than being top-to-bottom unacceptable.
And looking into the elaboration links I can see that the match seems to allow for a lot of overlap when either or both your and the candidate’s answers are qualified or conditioned, and then uses the factor of whether you marked each issue more or less important.
To some extent, yes, but character and competence are not generally ideological. One way a candidate can show character and competence on the issues is by correctly diagnosing what the nation’s most urgent priorities are, whereas a candidate without good character or competence will just campaign on whatever the polls or headlines say is most important.
84% Hillary Clinton
82% Bernie Sanders
68% Martin O’Malley
62% Chris Christie
60% Jeb Bush
56% Mike Huckabee
54% Jim Webb
53% Bobby Jindal
53% Carly Fiorina
52% Marco Rubio
46% Lindsey Grahams
46% Ted Cruz
46% John Kasich
41% Rick Santorum
37% Rand Paul
36% Ben Carson
31% Donald Trump
I wish Scoop Jackson were there. Figures at much at my result (with Christie being the top GOPer) because on social/domestic issues, I’m rather liberal, but on foreign policy and American Greatness, some might call me a “neo-con.”