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Voting by Issue

My parents, one of whom is a registered Democrat and the other of whom is a registered Republican, seem to be the swing voter types that I'm so puzzled by. Neither of them is particularly impressed with Bush, but they didn't have a real sense of which Democrat they should get behind. Mom has a strong aversion to Edwards (whom she had occasion to meet while she was head of a Community Watch group in North Carolina), and Dad can't stand Dean (I think the primal scream scared him off), but they didn't really know which candidate they were *for*.

I'd forwarded them the link to a Vote By Issue Quiz that my friend Valerie had sent me, and which I'd found very educational, but Mom didn't understand how to take it, and Dad didn't have time to. So when they came up this weekend to visit, and the conversation turned to politics, Al and I decided to help them take the quiz. It basically outlines all the candidates' positions on 14 different issues—without telling you who holds which position. At the end, you get to see which candidates you agreed with on what.

We read all the issues and all the positions, and Mom and Dad indicated which position they most agreed with for each issue. (Since the issues and positions are presented in random order each time you visit, even though we had two laptops going, they weren't parallel. I recorded Mom's votes directly in the form, and Al wrote down the first line of each position for each issue for Dad, and then filled in the form accordingly when we were done with Mom's quiz.)

I won't reveal which candidates Mom and Dad aligned with, but I did come out thinking that both of them were more liberal than I'd thought—and the one who's registered as a Republican seemed more liberal than the registered Democrat. It made me wish that they'd barred the Dems from mentioning Bush or his administration at all in their position statements, and that the quiz makers had put Bush's positions alongside all the Dems'. It would have been even more interesting to see whether my parents would have chosen Bush over a Democrat on any of the issues. (When you only have Democrats to choose from, you can't help but choose a Democrat.)

In any case, if you're a Democrat or want to vote in your state's Democratic primary, I highly recommend the Vote by Issue Quiz as a tool to help you figure out which candidate shares your views.

Since Pennsylvania doesn't allow voters registered as Non-Partisan to vote in any party's primary, I now have to make the decision whether it's worth re-registering as a Democrat to get a chance to vote. Given that the guy I'd probably vote for has no chance of winning, it might be moot... but if my vote keeps the race ambiguous for just a few days longer, it might be worth it. I don't think it's fair that a frontrunner gets annointed before half the states get a chance to voice their opinions, and I don't think it's necessary to jump on a bandwagon. Would a fight over the nomination at the Democratic Convention be a bad thing? On the contrary, I believe a nomination that isn't a foregone conclusion could revive interest in party conventions, and possibly encourage more people to vote.