Glassbooth: which candidate agrees with you?

by Todd Ritter Jan 29th 2008

If you're not sure which presidential candidate deserves your precious vote, spend 5 minutes on Glassbooth to learn which candidate's views most closely relate to yours. Glassbooth uses a two-part process to lead you to voting enlightenment.

The first part is a point-assignment exercise where you assign a total of 20 points to specific topics (gun control, abortion, health care, etc.) based on how important the issues are to you. It's kind of like video game "Create a Player" modes where you're given limited points to apply to your player's attributes to tweak the player the way you want.

The second part is a "strongly oppose"/"strongly agree" exercise that requires you to answer about 20 questions by choosing how much you agree with the question presented. Example: "I support or oppose investment in alternative forms of energy."

When you're all done, you're given a screen showing the top 3 candidates that agree with you, organized by how strongly your views coincide. You can use a drop-down list to view how closely you agree with other candidates as well. A short blurb about the selected candidate is presented along with a breakdown of the specific issues and the amount of similarity between your views and the candidate's views. You can link to the results page URL to show your friends what you think.

In addition to the quiz, you can browse through the candidates and their positions on issues (complete with citations).

Tags: candidate, election, president, voting

Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)

Marshall said 6:09PM on 1-29-2008

I haven't taken the test yet, but these always make me suspicious. One a few weeks back had around 80% of the population most similar to Dennis Kucinich. This was right before Obama took Iowa.

AlexL said 6:56PM on 1-29-2008

That's highly possible, because most of the time, the populace don't choose the candidate they most agree with, but rather the candidate getting the most attention from the media, seem most likely to win, etc.

Bufsabre said 6:59PM on 1-29-2008

i was obama first and paul second in one of these kind of tests and in this one i end up pulling mike gravel... figures that these were 3 of my top 4
1)paul
2) obama
3)kucinich
4) gravel

James said 12:53PM on 1-30-2008

I really hope this is honest -- I've been saying somebody should put this sort of thing together for ages. Now, if only people would actually *use* it instead of voting for the guy with the best hair or the one they've heard of the most...

James said 2:53PM on 1-30-2008

Update: I don't love the system they have. They ask you to agree/disagree on a scale of "strongly agree" to "strongly disagree", and I think they would have been better served with 3 options ('agree, don't care, disagree') because they obviously had a hard time matching up source material with ratings. Example: in real life, I probably agreed 95%+ with Fred Thompson's positions. But they only rated me at 74% agreement. Here's one instance of why we differed:

"Thompson said in a column written for the National Review on Jan. 19, 2007, that he supported Bush's plan to temporarily boost U.S. troop levels in Iraq because "the consequences of an American defeat in Iraq are so great." "

They call this "support" (but not "strong support") for "The Surge". I picked "Strong Support", so this actually hurt his score for me. Likewise, they have *four* quotes criticizing and strongly opposing firearms restrictions, then they give him an "oppose" instead of "strongly oppose".

It's so bad I'm actually beginning to suspect the motives of the people running the site. For instance, they say Huckabee "strongly supports" tax cuts, which is insane. They quote him talking about his "100 individual tax cuts" without pointing out that the actual tax burden on residents *increased* substantially during his time in office, so that score is wrong. Likewise, they single out The Flat Tax as an issue, then cite quotes agreeing or disagreeing with that one specific plan rather than simply asking if they favor any simpler tax code of some sort.

Another example: I can't stand Ron Paul (because he is insane -- hello, flamewar!), but I don't like the way they treated this. The give a quote saying we don't need private accounts, we need to stop giving our retirement money to the government in the first place. Then they describe *his bill* to create a lockbox system. Would you say that's "supporting" or "opposing" "Personal Social Security accounts"? If you said "supporting", you're wrong, apparently. Even though the first quote is against private accounts specifically, it still supports keeping your retirement money from being spent today, and obviously the second quote is in the same spirit. But Glassbooth gave Paul a "strongly oppose" for private accounts. WTF?

Anyway, good idea with flawed execution. If they just fixed the position scoring to be more in line with how the candidate actually acts/speaks, it could be a very useful tool.

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