PS. How come you guys have all these candidates but no one ever talks about them and they're not allowed to debate and stuff?

I'm voting Cynthia McKinney.

I'm almost as scary as you:

Total 68%
Social 75%
Economic 63%
Brian Moore
Socialist nominee for President

Total 68%
Social 75%
Economic 63%
Ralph Nader
Independent Candidate for President

Total 65%
Social 81%
Economic 54%
Cynthia McKinney
Green nominee; Former House member (D, GA)

The test is badly flawed, though. The real meaning of the answers you give ("Strongly oppose", "Support" etc) largely depends on the context and unless you click and read every single question before answering it, you'll have no way of knowing if what you think you said is what the authors of the quiz think you said.

Based on the above score, you are a Hard-Core Liberal .

There's my summary. It's really early in the a.m. and I can't quite muster the energy to think about my results in any meaningful way. But I quite agree with the boiled down version.

I got told I was a hard-core liberal too, which is something I don't actually embrace, particularly after reading the analyses of my results which put it into context of US politics. I don't wish to minimize government involvement at the expense of the common good. I believe (for example) in gun control, even though that is perceived as government involvement, because I see it as a collective responsibility.

But I recognize that the US constitution is a pretty different paradigm from my frame of reference. There isn't as much fretting about "individual liberties" here -- it's not part of our vocabulary. I don't really think in terms of maintaining as many of my personal freedoms as possible, and I think the connotations of "liberal" & "conservative" differ across the border.

I guess what I'm saying is that the results have only limited connection to my actual values.

Based on the above score, you are a Libertarian-Leaning Liberal.

I am also a Socialist voter.

Going down the list though, I got 43% for Obama and 29% for McCain. This confuses me since the last quiz had me as a McCaininite. Maybe he's changed his policies since then...

I also am a libertarian-leaning liberal. Here's my position on their little grid.

Your political philosophy is
Hard-Core Liberal.

Whod've guessed?

I'm so hard core my little red dot is trying to leave the game board.

I match closest with Cynthia McKinney.

Hey Taz, my dot is in the same place!

liberal libertarian right here. I don't really match up well with any of the candidates.

PS. How come you guys have all these candidates but no one ever talks about them and they're not allowed to debate and stuff?

That's a big topic, but it boils down to the reality that none of them have a realistic chance of winning enough votes to win enough electors to win the Presidency. According to Wikipedia, there are 13 candidates for President running as independents or fronting a party. The two major parties have long histories and a large membership at every level - local, state, and national - which makes them highly organized and developed. Each of those two majors runs its own primary elections process, and the winners of those two contests represent very broad support.

The Commission on Presidential Debates has been running the debates for awhile now. They are a private nonprofit, are nonpartisan, and run the debates at their own expense. Debating is not written into the Constitution and is not a government-run activity. So I'm glad they came along, because it's quite a public service, and they have formalized what had been a very erratic and politically driven process of staging debates at random, with different rules, and really very rarely:

The debates of 1858 set the stage for Abraham Lincoln's later run for the presidency; 1948 and 1956 were the only public debates among presidential candidates prior to 1960; there were no presidential debates between 1960 and 1976.

The commission has been around for 30 years and has gradually evolved criteria for selecting the debaters. The goal of the criteria is to present candidates in debate format who stand a realistic chance of being elected to the Presidency. Some people argue that if more candidates were allowed to debate, they'd stand a better chance of winning; but it's not realistic, statistically, for someone who has, despite having at least two years to campaign, not yet drawn the small fraction of popular vote required to qualify to sway a majority of voters so close to the election. The popular vote is not quite that up for grabs, because the major parties are so strong. So the time third-party candidates spend in primary campaigns is where they make their case for inclusion in the national debates - as far as I'm concerned, if they haven't motivated enough support by a couple months before the election, they haven't got what it takes to be President.

Third-party candidates do make it to the debates sometimes. Many of us remember Ross Perot and his pie charts.

In each of the last five elections, there were scores of declared candidates for the Presidency, excluding those seeking the nomination of one of the major parties. During the course of the campaign, the candidates are afforded many opportunities in a great variety of forums to advance their candidacies. In order most fully and fairly to achieve the educational purposes of its debates, the CPD has developed nonpartisan, objective criteria upon which it will base its decisions regarding selection of the candidates to participate in its 2008 debates. The purpose of the criteria is to identify those candidates who have achieved a level of electoral support such that they realistically are considered to be among the principal rivals for the Presidency.
In connection with the 2008 general election, the CPD will apply three criteria to each declared candidate to determine whether that candidate qualifies for inclusion in one or more of the CPD's debates. The criteria are (1) constitutional eligibility, (2) ballot access, and (3) electoral support. All three criteria must be satisfied before a candidate will be invited to debate.

B. 2008 Nonpartisan Selection Criteria

The CPD's nonpartisan criteria for selecting candidates to participate in the 2008 general election presidential debates are: 1.
Evidence of Constitutional Eligibility

The CPD's first criterion requires satisfaction of the eligibility requirements of Article II, Section 1 of the Constitution. The requirements are satisfied if the candidate:

a.
is at least 35 years of age;

b.
is a Natural Born Citizen of the United States and a resident of the United States for fourteen years; and

c.
is otherwise eligible under the Constitution.

2.
Evidence of Ballot Access

The CPD's second criterion requires that the candidate qualify to have his/her name appear on enough state ballots to have at least a mathematical chance of securing an Electoral College majority in the 2008 general election. Under the Constitution, the candidate who receives a majority of votes in the Electoral College, at least 270 votes, is elected President regardless of the popular vote.

3.
Indicators of Electoral Support


The CPD's third criterion requires that the candidate have a level of support of at least 15% (fifteen percent) of the national electorate as determined by five selected national public opinion polling organizations, using the average of those organizations' most recent publicly-reported results at the time of the determination.

A lot of people say that it's not fair that the debates generally come down to the two major parties. I think it's completely fair. They're major parties because they attract a lot of support, and people get involved in them. The time to mobilize the people is long before the primaries, and if you can't organize people into a body that acts to promote your candidacy and wins popular vote, how can you expect to serve as a useful President? Leadership is won through the creation of allegiances and the rallying of a group around a clearly stated common cause.

Also, we don't have a parliamentary government. If we did, criticism of a two-party system would make a lot more sense; and I really admire that form of government, which I think creates a much more robust debate and provides more voter choice. Our two-party system is one reason we're such a centrist country - right-center, in fact. But the parliamentary system also has its drawbacks. This is the system we've got; you have to be involved in it to change it, and you have to actually use it if you want to elect a third-party candidate. I know it's frustrating for third-party supporters, but it's really up to them to beat the drum for their candidates and party agendas during the primaries and run up to the election season.

I'd support giving third party candidates more attention if the current system didn't make it impossible for them to win. If we either had a run-off election or coalition governments then third parties would make sense to support but with our "winner of the plurality in one election gets to form the whole government system", they just act as spoilers.

I am Hillary first and Obama second. Which is exactly what I thought I was.

the current system didn't make it impossible for them to win.

What do you see that makes it impossible for them to win? Just curious.

I'm a libertarian-leaning liberal as well. But some questions on the quiz were, frankly, sort of stupidly worded, which is revealed after you click on the question itself.

For example, the "replace US with UN in Iraq" question implied to me this weird counterfacutal reality where the UN would set up a peacekeeping operation there after we withdraw, presumably through the sale of magic pink unicorns. I hate pink unicorns. But clicking on the question itself revealed that they were just asking about how I felt about our foreign aid policy and whether or not we should pay our UN dues and stuff.

Thanks for that, Miko -- you are brilliant! If I ever meet you I know I'm going to be like, "Uh... I like cheese." Because that is all I know.

'The Patriot Act harms civil liberties.' Nader is listed as neutral on this issue, and Moore as 'oppose,' despite that both candidates support repealing the thing. Is all their fact-checking so sketchy?

Miko left out one of the major factors behind the two-party system -- the "one man, one vote" principle and the winner-take-all system favored by the electoral college.

The U.S. used to have more fractured politics, and I don't use "fractured" loosely. Basically there were strong regional voting blocs and while today they are more or less owned by one of the two parties (e.g. the South was once Democratic, but is now Republican), these blocs sometimes held separate conventions and nominated their own candidates. After the Civil War, particularly, this was seen as potentially disastrous for the country. The 20th century has seen a number of semi-national third-party candidates who have been successful compared to the typical third place with 1 or 2% of the vote -- Roosevelt's Bull Moose Party run (against his own Vice President!), Robert LaFollette's Progressive Party, Strom Thurmond's Dixiecrat run, George Wallace, John Anderson, Ross Perot, and I think Ralph Nader gets enough press that he has to be considered. Bob Barr has gotten a decent amount of press because he's a former high-profile Congressman, and even non-candidates like Mitt Romney and Mike Bloomberg have been given a fair look.

But ultimately we do not have a system that favors fractional parties. It's built into the design of the system and would be difficult to dislodge without drastic constitutional changes. It isn't simply a matter of the American temperament, and it's probable that public attitudes have actually adjusted to the system over time. It's natural in the U.S. for issue positions to gravitate to one party or the other in a binary or Manichean fashion.

I think we do lose something in this process, at the very least a recognition of the gray areas where most issues end up being decided, and a sense that compromise equals loss. On the other hand, we gain a strong sense of electoral stability that is probably, not that it was intentional or predicted, a good feature for a superpower to have. No such thing as a snap election. We don't have splinter parties bogging up parliamentary action or having outsized electoral influence in selecting prime ministers or cabinet officers. These are not automatically problems that parliamentary systems have, but they do tend to exist in varying degrees in all of them.

Hm. I'm not sure I see those problems (bogging, influencing) in Canada, but I agree they could exist theoretically.

I definitely think the black-and-white-ness of the US system is a huge flaw. There's no spectrum. People are voting against a candidate as often as they are voting for one. And there's so much us-vs-them thinking... I mean, I've been reading political discussion on a couple of craft message boards and it's honestly "you liberals" this and "you republicans" that and so. much. vitriol. it's unbelievable to me.

But I know making criticisms as an outsider sets you guys on edge, and I really don't want to offend anyone personally. It's just all very interesting to me.

Yet another Libertarian Leaning Liberal here. (chart. I love charts.)

Total 63%
Social 75%
Economic 54%
Cynthia McKinney
Green Party

Total 60%
Social 69%
Economic 54%
Gloria La Riva
Party for Socialism and Liberation

Total 60%
Social 69%
Economic 54%
Brian Moore
Socialist

Total 58%
Social 75%
Economic 46%
Hillary Clinton
Democratic Jr Senator

Total 58%
Social 69%
Economic 50%
Ralph Nader
Independent Candidate

Total 58%
Social 56%
Economic 58%
Barack Obama
Democratic

Total 38%
Social 25%
Economic 46%
Chuck Baldwin
Contitution Party

Total 30%
Social 13%
Economic 42%
Bob Barr
Libertarian

Total 20%
Social 6%
Economic 29%
John McCain
Republican

I was Hillary (60%) and Obama (58%). But I still don't like Hillary. It's more of a personality conflict than anything.

Huh, coulda swore I posted this note earlier, but was at the office and distracted. But: thanks, stilicho, for that excellent post.

Nah, Miko, I should be thanking you. ;-)

Huh, it matched me with Hilary and Cynthia McKinney. I'll have to investigate McKinney more before I write in Mike Gravel.

The question and answer mechanism was definitely FUBAR. The UN question goes from "put the UN in IRAQ" on one end to "leave the UN and go 100% isolationist" on the other. I picked Oppose, because I believe we need to fix our domestic situation moreso than anything international, but I don't think we should secede from the UN at all.

Lovely comments in this thread, but I still think the two-party system is fucked, and is fucking up America.