Data Science & Psychology Data Science applied to Values, Morals, Politics, & things that matter.

In 2008, I co-founded VoteHelp.org as a way to help people with the question "Who should I vote for?"  In 2008, it served over 500,000 people, but we didn't get any demographic information at the time, so, while valuable, I couldn't answer many of the questions I wanted to answer about the use of "candidate calculators", which is a name sometimes given to sites that allow you to enter your political opinions into a website, which then attempts to match your opinions to those of political candidates.  In 2012, I added a few optional questions to the end of the quiz that asked the age, gender, political ideology, and planned candidate choice of quiz takers.

Right now, we rank #2 or #3 (I've seen both) for the search query "who should I vote for" on Google and according to Google, about 15,000 people have searched for that query over the past 30 days, with about 5000 clicking on VoteHelp.org.  Some number of people do not fill out our surveys (25% bounce rate) and of those, only 30% or so fill out our optional demographics questions.  Browser referral information isn't always sent, so I can only identify 470 who definitely typed in "who should I vote for" into Google to come to our site during the 2012 election, the bulk of which occurred in the last 30 days.  Still, I think it's perhaps indicative of the kind of person who searches the internet for voter information.

Who is this person?  The average age was 30.3 years old (SD = 11.1), with people as young as 12 and as old as 87 taking the survey.  56% of quiz takers were male.  Judging by the below charts, the average person who asks Google who they should vote for really is likely to be undecided and moderate.

What do these voters care about?  In order to eliminate the effects of the liberals and conservatives, I looked just at the 201 people who said they were moderate or apolitical.  Here is the list of issues they care about in descending order of importance.

Issue Importance

And here are their stances on these issues, with questions they agreed to listed first, and questions they disagreed with listed last.  Note that these questions were asked on a 7 point scale with 1 = strongly disagree, 4 = in the middle, and 7 =  strongly agree.

Statement Agreement

What can we conclude from these analyses?  It seems like the kinds of people who are asking for help on the internet are people who might be classified as populists.  They appear to be mainly younger men, who want compromise in government, favor liberal policies like higher taxes on the wealthy, higher spending on education, and more corporate regulation, but also favor conservative policies like stricter immigration enforcement and stricter controls on government spending.  Of course, perhaps taking the average of these undecided voters obscures differences among these voters.  Also, these results are likely to generalize best to the types of individuals who are actively using the internet to figure out who to vote for, since our sample all typed in "Who should I vote for?" into Google and then took the VoteHelp quiz.  On one promising note for these analyses, these results do seem to converge with the media's depiction of the voters who both campaigns appear to be trying to woo right now.

- Ravi Iyer