It’s four days to Election Day and you still cannot decide whether it should be President Bush or U.S. Sen. John F. Kerry (D-Mass.) signing the next lease to the White House. Well, that’s what the Presidential Guidester – a new Web tool to help the undecided – is for.
The brainchild of New York-based Decidia, the Presidential Guidester uses drop-down menus or click-polling to help undecided Netizens get a better picture of who their likely choice might become, based on their answers to particular issues from the war in Iraq to the economy, from gun control to gay rights, from abortion to the Patriot Act.
You’ll even get to pick the type of previous political experience you think most significant to a presidential choice, and once you finish those and other questions, you’ll get a rating for each candidate.
There is no specific offering regarding Adult entertainment, with the closest you might get to a pick sitting with the “Ethics/family values/morality” selection listed under non-economic issues and problems.
You can also rate the importance of such background criteria as the candidate’s education, work history in and out of politics, and issue positions such as the economy and taxation, election reform, national security, religion and government, welfare, terrorism, and more.
Presidential Guidester seems to shuffle it to come out that a voter opposing abortion and gun control while supporting the Iraq war effort is more likely to see Bush score high, while a voter supporting abortion and gun control while opposing the war or believing the U.N. should have a stronger involvement in the war is more likely to see Kerry and, to a lesser extent Nader, score high.
“We’re a privately held, next-gen search company, and we develop online decision systems for companies like Sharp and Lexmark. But we saw how tight this race was going to be and how bitterly divided this country was and we decided to make and donate PG to the American public,” Decidia vice president for marketing Jared Kirsch told AVNOnline.com. “We’re not making any money on this. We basically donated this. What’s justifying our investment is articles [in the press] and getting the word out.”
Decidia said a third of those visiting and using the Presidential Guidester in its first week identify themselves as undecided. Decidia also said a number of high-profile Web sites – including those of six large newspapers and special-interest groups like the National Abortion Rights Alliance Pro-Choice America and the Interfaith Alliance – have linked to the Presidential Guidester.
Other special interest groups linking to the site give a stronger suggestion that the site itself is not designed as a partisan poll: the Alliance for Retired Americans, the Arab-American Anti-Discrimination League, the American Conservative Union, the Log Cabin Republicans, the Muslim Public Affairs Council, and Taxpayers for Common Sense.
“We’re over 370,000 [users] as of this morning,” Kirsch said October 29, “and we’ve been getting a disproportionate percentage of those as undecided.”
Why such a large number of undecided in a presidential election some think the most important the United States has faced in many years? Kirsch said a disproportionate number of undecideds sough a wide variety of tools to help them decide. “There’s no minute like the last minute,” he said.
Decidia vice president of business development Eddie Bessler, however, said a great deal of the major media coverage of the campaigns factors in. “If you just pick up today’s paper,” he said, “what do you believe? Nobody knows just what to believe. And I think that is what makes for such a large number of undecided voters.”
