There’s nothing as depressing as asking young people whether they plan to participate in the election and hearing them tell you they have no idea which candidate to be for or what the differences are or, worse, that it doesn’t matter. What do you do with such a person? Can you really force someone to sit down and read a voter’s guide? And what would they learn if they did? Probably more about what’s wrong with their opponents than what’s right about their candidates.
In March 2012, two friends from opposite sides of the political aisle decided to do something that people on opposite sides of the aisle in politics today rarely do: collaborate. Try to collect information. Most importantly, try to provide information, and of course to do so in our latest social media style.
iSideWith.com, which is updated weekly, contains a list of about 50 questions covering all the major hot spots in presidential politics. An algorithm that they developed and continue to refine compares your answers to a candidate’s stance. There is a whole range of measures intended to quantify various factors, including the candidate’s voting history, the level of passion of the voter and the candidate, how often the candidate addresses a certain issue, etc.
Of course, the system isn’t perfect. Its real goal may be less to predict an ultimate vote than to engage people simply in asking the question.
Consider the case of my assistant, the brilliant Kathy, a person of extremely good judgment. She took the test, and according to the algorithm, Sen. Bernie Sanders is her man — and not just her man, but her man 90 percent of the time, which may reflect her political ideology, but not her sound judgment. She would never vote for Sanders. They forgot to ask her whether she cares about her candidate winning.
There are glitches, to be sure, but almost 15 million people have at least checked out the site, which suggests that the hunger for something that at least feels like an objective analysis and not a subjective screaming match can be satisfied somewhere.
It also reflects the simple reality that there are just too many Republican candidates. It’s not hard to keep Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders straight. The same cannot be said of the current crop of young Republican candidates. And the differences between them are important, but some people simply have no business further confusing this race. The issue is not why Donald Trump is running for president — he’s running so that as many people like you and me as possible will be writing about him and talking about him, even if some of it is derisive. We always spell his name right.
And why do we do that? It’s one thing for him to declare himself a candidate and quite another for every news show to cover it as if it matters, turning what should be our nation’s most serious exercise in democracy into his personal circus.
Last time we checked, Trump hasn’t made it onto the iSideWith.com candidate list. Here’s hoping he never does, and that more such experiments in drawing people into democracy will produce more and more educated voters in the future.
The Dispatch Editorial Board is made up of publisher Peter Imes, columnist Slim Smith, managing editor Zack Plair and senior newsroom staff.
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