Select2008 Blog - Comparing and tracking the 2008 presidential candidates

The Florida primaries are turning the race for the Republican nomination into a two-man race between John McCain and Mitt Romney. Although the two candidates emphasize their differences of personality, leadership style and record, both candidates disagree on five key policy issues:

- Energy and environment: both candidates disagree on the remedies to global warming and energy independence, such as supporting biofuels and corn ethanol subsidies, tapping into domestic sources of oil such as the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR) and the Outer Continental Shelf (OCS), setting up a Federal market to trade carbon emissions caps, and increasing research funding for alternative energy technology;

- Healthcare: both candidates disagree on market-based approaches to lower healthcare costs, to increase competition in the healthcare market and to increase access to health insurance, such as drug reimportation, setting up a means-tested tax credits for healthcare insurance, creating a tax deduction for out-of-pocket healthcare expenses, a tax deduction for healthcare costs, or subsidies to high-cost and low-income individuals to supplement tax credits and Medicaid;

- Homeland Security and war on terrorism: both candidates disagree on acceptable means to the war on terrorism, such as maintaining the Guantanamo Bay prison camp, supporting the use of enhanced interrogation techniques, like waterboarding,, and supporting the NSA‘s warrantless wiretapping program;

- Social issues: the candidates disagree on gun control and on whether to propose an amendment to the U.S. Constitution on marriage, defining marriage as a union between a man and a woman; their support of a pro-life position and record on the question also differ;

- Taxes: the candidates’ proposed tax policies are different both on tax incentives to corporations and income tax; they also have not both signed the Taxpayer Protection Pledge.

Popularity: 49% [?]

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: 56% [?]

As noted in a previous post, Rudy Giuliani still has an edge when it comes to connecting with voters on issues and proposals. If he managed to maintain his lead over John McCain, he would still have a good shot at coming back to the top of the pack in the Florida primary and the Super Tuesday contest.

Rudy Giuliani‘s position might nonetheless be weaker than it seems: although he ends up being ahead of other candidates overall, his lead stems from being strong on all issues, but without necessarily leading. Although, this seems to indicate that his candidacy is overall well-rounded, it might prevent him from differentiating from the other candidates, as Huckabee has done it on social issues for instance.

However, policy and programmatic positions are only one aspect of the political equation. Giuliani‘s lower profile over the last few weeks might have hurt his exposure in the media beyond recovery.

Popularity: 27% [?]

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% [?]