So what happens next?

We don’t know. That is the short (and honest) answer. Too many times in this race have ‘certainties’ been confounded - Giuliani was a shoo-in, McCain was dead in the water, Clinton was unstoppable, Clinton had lost it etc - for us to claim the slightest confidence in any predicted outcome.

Right now we would be wary of ruling out any possible combination of nominees - McCain is certain for the Republicans? Based on his delegate count, probably, but here is a thought for you (and one which wishes Mr McCain no ill will, and seems unlikely given the energy of his 96 year-old mother) - what if he dies before the convention? Would Huckabee be selected nominee in reflection of the fact that he was the second to last man standing? Or would Mitt step back in? Or someone completely different? Who knows? We don’t and nor does anyone else. But it is just the kind of thing that people love to speculate about.

But we are not going to; we are just going to report some numbers for now. After 50k users have taken our quiz there are some interesting pieces of insight. Around 40% of you have selected the ‘independent’ option (and based upon the traffic you are almost all American). There is a pretty much an even split between Republicans and Democrats for the remaining 60%. Most Democrats are more strongly aligned to the left-field, left-wing Mike Gravel, and were he not an option are matched to Obama over Clinton. On the Republican side - and this could be very significant in the months ahead - fewer than half the people who expect to get McCain as a match find themselves most closely aligned to his policies.

That’s it for now - a return to speculation after the next set of primaries.

Goodbye Rudy Tuesday

So, Rudy has dropped out of the race of the Republican nomination. You could of course be forgiven that he was even still in it, given how low his media profile has been over the last couple of months. To an outside observer the most obvious question is ‘how someone who was the front runner so long screw up so badly?’ - to which the answer has to be strategy.

It is easy to see how the idea was sold to Rudy - forget the early states - you can’t win them, they don’t have many delegates and they will just waste your time and money. Leave them to the others whilst you focus on the real prizes like Florida. And you can see why he bought it - who wants to actively campaign in a state and then come in third or worse? - the risk of being branded a loser is too high. The advice was wrong. You can’t ignore the early states, even if you are going to come in third, because people forget you exist.

It is harsh, but it is true - in the 24 hour media cycle world with internet headlines updating hourly if you aren’t fighting, you aren’t news - and these days people have very short memories. It doesn’t matter how big your ad spend is in the local markets - if you aren’t in the news, you aren’t credible. To his credit, Giuliani has done a service to future Presidential candidates - he has tested a potentially viable theory and proved it wrong.

His failure has been very clear to us on WSYVF - despite the fact that our our quiz takers are not a scientific sample, the fact that out of the 4,000 self declared Republicans who have taken the test so part almost as many people were expecting to get Ron Paul as a result as were Rudy suggested that his days were numbered long before the Florida ballots were counted.

Quizzes updated again

Just a quick note to say all three quizzes have been updated to reflect John Edwards and Rudy Giuliani pulling out of the race - we’ll comment on that soon. Meanwhile, the quiz has been taken nearly 12,000 times so far - do spread the word!

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