Insight from the first six thousand

We launched our US Primary version of Whoshouldyouvotefor.com (WSYVF hereafter) just over a week ago and already we are starting to see some really interesting results. Our lives have been made just a little difficult because three of the candidates decided to drop out (thanks guys, we had to re-code the site more than once because of you).

The quiz has been taken over six thousand times, and we wanted to share some of the stats and insight with you - though the dropping out of candidates will mean that some of the trends are unlikely to continue.

The first point is the profil of the quiz takers - we had, broadly speaking, expected there to be more Democrats than Republicans - what we hadn’t excepted was how many Independents there were going to be - 40% of the total, with the Republicans and Democrats on 27% and 33% respectively. It might be that many people taking the quiz want to see how they compare against the candidates from both parties, rather than being registered Independents - but if nothing else it does suggest that there are a large number of floating voters out there.

In terms of candidates meeting expectations, there are some clear winners and losers. On the Democrat side both of the front runners suffer considerably when peoples’ expectations are matched against their true match against the candidates - for both Obama and Clinton more than 50% of people who expected to get them as a match didn’t. Edwards did better, with slightly more people getting him as a match than were expecting, but the real winners were the two candidates on the left of the party - Kucinich and Gravel - with Kucinich (now departed from the campaign of course) being the out right best performer with 41% of Democrats getting his as a match, despite only 8% expecting him.

Things are a little less polarised on the Republican side, but perhaps more significantly the positive swings impact mainstream candidates. McCain does poorly, with only 11% receiving him as a match, despite 21% expecting to get him - we will drill into the data to see if there are particular issues which are causing this swing. Romney does badly too, though marginally better in the overall results with 13% receiving him as a match. The top peformers are Huckabee with almost double the expected matches at 30% - the top performing Repbulican, and Giuliani who comes in a reasonable second. Here at WSYVF we suspect that the poor expectation of getting a match against Giuliani is more a reflection on his strategy of effectively ignoring the early states (and therefore the media coverage) rather than perception of his policies.

Perhaps the most interesting group are the people who describe themselves as Independents - the people who will ultimately decide this election, no matter which candidates are picked. Well, we hate to say, but it is really to early to learn too much about them - other than the now former candidate Kucinich there is no clear leader (and we suspect that the Kucinich bias of indies reflects Europeans taking the quiz in the early days - they are just that bit more left-wing in general!). It will be interesting to see how things develop now that Kucinich is out (and now that the vast majority of the traffic is the US).

That’s it for now, more soon

The WSYVF Team