Vote Match
Earlier today I found this website, Vote Match, which compares your answers to several policy questions with how various politicians have voted. There are lots of political compass-type quizzes out there on the web, but I liked how with this one actually used a position-by-position comparison rather than just telling me where I fell on a map of the political spectrum. The problem with this site, though is that it's way out of date, treating the 2000 election as a current event.
Two questions, then.
1. Does anybody know of any good political comparison sites out there that are more up-to-date, especially ones that compare issue-by-issue?
2. I noticed that even for the politicians whose positions I most closely match, my similarity score is pretty low. Compared with the various California congressmen, for example, my closest match is only a 55%, for Howard Berman. The social/economic splits can be pretty severe, too. I'm a 42% economic match for both Berman and Bob Dornan, but while I get rated a 75% social match with Berman, I'm a 0% (that's right, ZERO --- even though we're both anti-abortion) match with Dornan.
While overall I tend to be a much better match with the Democrats than with the Republicans, I have enough beefs with them that every time I vote, I feel like I'm making a compromise and voting for the lesser of two evils. My question, then, is whether the rest of you are able to find politicians (congressmen, specifically) who are better matches than 55%. Do others who feel more confident supporting their parties find better matches, or is my case not that unusual?
posted by Adam Villani @ 8/23/2006 11:42:00 PM
3 comments
3 Comments:
Here's something weird. The question is "support prayer in public schools", while the way it comes up on the score is "support moral teaching in public schools". Those are two totally different things!
BTW, I'm apparently a "hard-core liberal". I don't think I'd usually describe myself that way.
BTW, I'm 78%/16% They gave me a 65% match with Kerry.
It seems to give a non-match for any "no opinion." This explains the zero match with B-1 Bob on social issues, as there weren't any abortion votes in their database for him.
For the presidential race in 2004, I get a 55% for Kerry as my top match, split into 63% social/50% economic. With Nader I was a closer social match but a weaker economic match, which sounds about right.
Despite the test describing me as a "Libertarian-leaning Liberal," (81% personal/42% economic) I was a weaker match with the Libertarian Presidential candidate than Kerry in both the social and economic categories. In my experience the Libertarians have some good ideas but they take them to extremes; I may agree with their ideas as starting principles but I'm also a firm believer in a lot of limitations on those ideas.
It gave me a 30% match for Bush, a 25% match for Cheney, and a 23% match for Peroutka, my lowest match.
For the nationwide House member match, I got a 60% with David Minge from Minnesota. My 75% social match for him is largely because he's a pro-life liberal; it looks like he agrees with me that personal freedom is a good thing to enshrine in law, but that abortion is not a matter that falls into that category.
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