[BWN] Kucinich the Runaway Leader on the Issues - Take the survey

Survey of Public Attitudes Makes Kucinich the Runaway Leader on the Issues

http://www.earthtimes.org/articles/show/news_press_release,152947.shtml

CLEVELAND, Aug. 3 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- In the political equivalent of a "blind taste test" taken by more than 67,000 participants, an independent website surveying public attitudes on various issues is reporting that Ohio Congressman and Democratic Presidential candidate Dennis Kucinich is the first choice of a phenomenal 53% of respondents.

No other candidate, Democrat or Republican, even reaches double digits.

The website: http://www.dehp.net/candidate/ has been asking respondents to express and rank their opinions on 25 different issues -- the war in Iraq, health care, the environment, Patriot Act, etc. -- that have been raised and debated among the Presidential candidates in both parties. Those surveyed vote only on the issues, not for or against any individual candidate. The 67,000-plus responses were then correlated with the positions of all of the candidates as reported on http://www.2decide.com/. The results are here: http://www.dehp.net/candidate/stats.php.

As of this morning (the survey is recalculated every five minutes), more than 35,600 respondents were "in sync" with Kucinich on the issues. Democratic front-runner Senator Hillary Clinton was the first-place choice of only about 2,400 respondents (3.6%). Other leading candidates fared even worse: Senator Barack Obama (3%), and former Senator John Edwards (1.3%).

"When people vote exclusively on the issues that are important to them, without being influenced by name recognition, celebrity, or millions of dollars in advertising, Congressman Kucinich wins in a landslide," his campaign said today.

Kucinich for President

The people above are ranked based on how often they are computed to be one of the top three choices for users who submit their political choices. A log entry is made each time a user submits their choices. This log entry contains, among other things, the top three choices for that user. What you see above is a tally of all the choices, weighted by their position for each user. We'll call that the number of Hot Pockets they have earned. The first-place candidate gets 3 Hot Pockets, the second-place candidate gets 2, and the third-place candidate gets 1 Hot Pocket (which everyone knows is just not enough). This method gives you a more fair representation of the interests of the users.

You would probably be interested to know that Kucinich has been the first choice of 36571 people (out of 68789). That wasn't my intention or expectation when making this site, but it is certainly interesting.

Without any weighting, the above graph plots only the number of times a candidate was ranked first.

Above you get to see what the other people chose on the various issues. This should shed some light on the order of the candidates in the graph above it. These numbers use the weights that users selected when they submitted their data.

[See all of the stats from the link above.]

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