Which Presidential candidate gets your worldview? Find out now!

There are a lot of websites cropping up that ask you a series of 9-15 questions on issues of the day and then based up your results tell you which candidate comes closest to your world view. Why the Government doesn't have a more in detail site like this for every presidential candidate in every election..?...hmmmph.

None of these sites are great. All of them have at least 2-3 "bad" questions. For example they ask, "Energy: Do you support federal assistance for the production of ethanol and/or biofuel as an alternative to oil?"

The idea behind the question is essentially, "Should be we giving money to US corporations to develop alternate fuel sources so situations in the Middle East will not dictate the price of fuel, or should the government not give out money, even to end our reliance on the middle east?" As it stands, I think a lot of people would not get the implications of the question.

They ask, "Social Security: Do you favor the concept of privatization of Social Security to any degree?" Well, as someone who answered "No", I think the problem with this question is that it is a very weighted issue. Do I think we could do something positive to privatize social security? Possibly. Do I think the odds are that any move to privatize social security will backfire on a large chunk of the populace due to stock market fluctuations which will ultimately dictate a hugely expensive government bailout--- Absolutely. So I am forced to say no. If you give in on privatizing social security, there is no way social security (which is quite fixable) will ever be fixed. As soon as you go with privatized social security, the politicians will loot National Social Security funds.


Then their are the questions that have answers that don't match up with the candidate's views or are quite similar. Do I vote "Decentralize Iraq by dividing it into regions of separate governments." or "Draw down the U.S. troops and decentralize Iraq by dividing it into regions of separate governments."? I voted for the latter and they said Joe Biden disagreed with me on this issue, but on his site he clearly states, "It is now time to start drawing down U.S. forces, not just to pre-surge levels but well below them, and to limit the mission of those who remain to fighting al-Qaida in Iraq, training Iraqis to police themselves and helping them protect their own borders." So in fact, the site is wrong on this issue.

That said, this site is pretty good. They rightly named my top two candidates as Biden then Obama.

This one is a scaled down WQAD candidate survey is based on the original SELECT A CANDIDATE survey developed by Minnesota Public Radio and posted at: http://minnesota.publicradio.org/projects/ongoing/select_a_candidate/.

http://www.wqad.com/Global/link.asp?L=259460

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The original is much more detailed (made by NPR, so no suprise there.)

http://minnesota.publicradio.org/projects/ongoing/select_a_candidate/poll.php?race_id=13


"Frequently Asked Questions

Q: Does Select A Candidate tell me who to vote for?

A: Absolutely not. Its main purpose is to introduce you to the candidates who are running and their positions on the issues.

Q: How did you come up with these questions?

A: The questions mirror the campaign. There might be issues we are interested in that haven't come up in the campaign so far, and those aren't listed here. Should they come up -- and we have a mechanism for your interests to be part of the campaign -- they will be added to Select A Candidate. The choices from each question mirror positions that candidates have stated. If no answer is close to your position, do not answer the question, for there is no candidate with that position.

Q: How does the scoring work?

A: Each candidate gets 1 point for each question that matches your answer. If you indicate that an issue is very important to you, the candidate gets 3 points. If you indicate that the issue is of no importance to you, the candidate gets 0 points. In this way, the "match" is weighted to reflect those issues on which you decide elections."