Estrich: Online quiz has potential to draw people into democracy
By Susan Estrich
Published: June 21, 2015, 12:00am
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There is 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 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 spectrum decided to do something that people from opposite sides of the political spectrum rarely do: collaborate. Their aim? Try to collect and information, and, of course, to do so in our latest social media style.
ISideWith.com, which is updated weekly, contains about 50 questions covering many of the major hot topics in presidential politics. An algorithm that the two friends developed and continue to refine compares your answers to a candidate’s stance. A range of measures quantify factors, including the candidate’s voting history, the level of passion of the voter and the candidate, and how often the candidate addresses a certain issue.
Imperfect system
The system isn’t perfect, but its goal might be less to predict an ultimate vote than to engage people simply in asking the question.
Consider the case of my assistant, 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 might reflect her political ideology, but not her sound judgment.
Kathy said she would never vote for Sanders. The quiz forgot to ask her whether she cares about her candidate winning.
There are glitches, to be sure, but more than 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 Republican candidates. 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 is running so as many people as possible will write about him and talk 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 own 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 educated voters.
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