Select2008 Blog - Comparing and tracking the 2008 presidential candidates

The Select2008 Blog was just added to the Wonkosphere directory of political blogs tracking the 2008 election cycle. The Select2008 Blog is one of the only 65 independent blogs tracking the 2008 presidential election - as opposed to over a thousand liberal and conservative blogs.

The Select2008 Blog currently focuses on the four top face offs of the 2008 presidential primaries - Clinton v. Obama, McCain v. Huckabee, Clinton v. McCain, and McCain v. Obama, by:

- Comparing and tracking candidates’ programs and policy positions, which is based on Select2008.com’s detailed analysis of presidential candidates’ electoral platforms (over a thousand bite-size questions);

- Compiling and reporting on Select2008.com’s live polling, which is based on 450,000 votes over the last month.

For additional information on Wonkosphere, here’s a summary in their own words:

“Wonkosphere is designed for those who seek an analysis of the political buzz that is timely and unbiased.

Wonkosphere tracks hundreds of blogs and web sites per day, more than any human can read. Patented technology text analysis technology identifies posts that matter, not just posts that are popular.

If you’re tracking individual candidates, our unique analysis will show you their share of buzz in conservative and liberal blogs, highlight the most representative posts, and tell you whether the tone of discussion about your candidate is trending up or down.“

Popularity: 28% [?]

With the Super-Tuesday primaries contest only a week away, there are more than differences of leadership style and personality between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama.

The top Democratic candidates to the presidential nomination have actual disagreements on five key domestic issues:

- Universal healthcare: universal coverage for all Americans, mandatory coverage for all Americans, drugs reimportation, means-tested tax credits for healthcare insurance, health insurance for small business employees, access to the Federal Employees Health Benefits Program;

- Immigration: support for driving licenses for undocumented immigrants, scope of earned legalization program;

- Home ownership: remedies to the subprimes crisis;

- Retirement: Raising or eliminating the cap on Social Security taxable income to prevent benefit cuts for future retirees, levying Social Security taxes on income revenues higher than $200,000/year;

- Government accountability and transparency: accepting or refusing lobby money to fund his or her campaign.

Popularity: 57% [?]

Select2008.com has now been in public beta for the last two months. We’d like to take this opportunity to thank all of our users for their useful and insightful feedbacks.

Select2008.com helps users select their top candidate for the 2008 Primaries and/or the Presidential election by answering a personalized sequence of questions on policy and programs. Select2008.com is now geared towards the Democratic and Republican primaries, ahead of the primary seasons and February 5 “Super Tuesday”.

We have added a workflow to the questionnaire to make it easier for users to change candidates, select specific issues to vote on or to review their results. Our analysis has worked out the policy and program differences between the candidates to save users valuable time and effort.

We use advanced analytics to ask the most relevant and selective questions to zero in on your top candidate, from a database of over 1,500 questions on policy and programs.

The service now pre-selects for Democratic and Republican voters the major candidates in each field, Clinton, Edwards, and Obama for the Democratic primaries and Giuliani, Huckabee, McCain, Paul, Romney, and Thompson for the Republican primaries. This segmentation also helps selecting the most selective questions in the key topics for each party, such as the economy and taxes for the Republicans and healthcare and the war in Iraq for the Democrats.

The What’s Hot section enables users to continuously screen for the most disputed questions across the entire field of presidential contestants. Select2008 now also offers candidate profile pages that let users analyze, compare, and explore candidates’ positions on all questions in our database.

Select2008’s database of 1,500 questions covers the whole spectrum of policy and programmatic issues for the 2008 presidential elections, including the war in Iraq, the economy – globalization, business regulation, home ownership, and predatory lending, innovation and public funding for research –, healthcare plans, taxes, government reform, war on terrorism, homeland security – Guantanamo Bay prison, enhanced interrogation techniques, and preparedness –, education – student loan reforms, access to college education, and support for education vouchers –, energy and environment plans – alternative energy sources, global warming, and energy independence.

Results not only tell users who their favorite candidates are, but also how much in agreement they are with them issue by issue. Users can then register to save their results and compare their position and results with their friends.

Popularity: 11% [?]