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Friday, January 11, 2008

Candidate Matchmaker

My ranking of Presidential candidates, according to the Candidate Matchmaker poll:

63% Mike Huckabee
45% Duncan Hunter
43% Ron Paul
40% Fred Thompson
38% John McCain
30% Rudy Giuliani
28% Hillary Clinton
28% Mike Gravel
25% John Edwards
25% Barack Obama
25% Mitt Romney
20% Dennis Kucinich



Interesting.

4 comments:

  1. How did Barrack get ahead of Mitt?

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  2. They are both at 25%, so maybe it is a tie. Romney has changed his positions lately, but the poll has included data on what he actually did as governor.

    The poll is quite sensitive to answers. As a test, I changed my reply to one question a bit, and Romeny went up in the final result.

    Some of the questions are ambiguous, and I couldn't come up with a clear answer. After taking the test several times with this variation, Huckabee always came out on top, Kucinich on the bottom, and Rudy and Hillary were always adjacent in the middle.

    But we ought not discount the possibility of category error in the poll. This candidates are categorized according to the two-dimensional grid favored by Libertarians, where the two axes are social and economic liberalism. (But what is usually labeled 'totalitarian' in this kind of grid is called 'populist' here.) Perhaps Catholic categories would provide better answers, like 'orthodox' or 'heretic'!

    I've often heard that governors make better presidential candidates than senators, partly because they have a clear track record of executive decisions. Senators, since they act collectively and not personally, can usually weasel out of taking responsibility for bad decisions.

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  3. I was a little different than you. I had Mike Huckabee in first, Duncan Hunter in second, Fred Thompson in third, John McCain in fourth, then Mitt Romney, Ron Paul Rudy Giuliani, and then the Democrats. Neat Matchmaker.

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  4. Another problem with this poll is it puts equal weight for issues like abortion and, well, everything else. Sure I have an opinion on gun control, but the fact is, I really don't care what a candidate's opinion is on that subject. If the candidate is not first pro-life, who cares if I agree with them on every other issue?

    I had Thompson first, followed by Huckabee and Obama tied for second. Yet, because of Obama's opinion on abortion, I don't care if he had been a 99% match. I wouldn't vote for him (I guess I'm not a Pat Robertson-type person).

    To be more accurate, this poll needs one more section allowing us to rank the importance of certain issues.

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