Election Quiz - iSideWith.com

I was talking to a friend yesterday about an election year quiz he uses with his students:  iSideWith.  It's a quiz that asks questions on various issues and gives quite a bit of answer choices (unlike other quizzes that I have seen) for the person that takes the quiz to choose from.  OK.  That's a choppy sentence.

I actually called him up to see if he had any information on another topic.  He's good at steering conversations in a direction he wants it to go.  He could sell ice cubes to an Eskimo.  Actually given global warming and climate change,  that's getting much easier.  I'm going to need an new analogy for describing a good salesperson.....

In any event,  after talking to him about it,  I was curious enough to sit down and take the quiz.  I liked the questions.  Each question provided a "learn more box" that was pretty decent in the description of the issue and as neutral as possible.  And I could go with the plain vanilla pro-con or get into the "grey areas" that provided a more nuanced answer.  I used many grey area answers and typed up a few of my own responses.

The topics of the quiz were grouped together and covered a wide variety of issues:  elections, education, the environment, the economy, crime, domestic policy, etc.  Depending upon the central theme there were a few or many questions.  Some of them dealing with very current news issues (the Panama Papers, ISIL, Syria, the Supreme Court nomination).

I was impressed with this part.  It took me a bit to get through,  but I liked the thoroughness of the questions and topics.

The results:  Well,  according to the quiz I line up with Bernie Sanders and Dr Jill Stein.  Then a whole bunch of Libertarian candidates that I am not familiar with.  Then the Republicans and Constitution Party.  I am ignoring Hillary Clinton & the Democratic Party completely.  I don't care what any quiz results say,  I will not vote for her.

For political parties - Green then Socialist Party USA.  Then the rest of the pack.  Percentages are given that show how close you and the candidate/party match up.

On the positive side,  third parties are included and I did have a socialist party come up as #2.  So I can get away with calling myself an eco-socialist.  I don't know that I would vote Green as they advocate environmentally friendly capitalism.  I have a hard time wrapping my head around that concept.  I think that I agree with a good chunk of their platform?  It's their philosophy I struggle with.

My question is why do they list the Socialist Party USA and not have their candidates listed?   And I noticed that the party answers didn't always come from the SP-USA. Some came from the ISO and other socialist organizations.  Are they using the SP-USA as an archetype?  I wish this was made clear.

I looked at the requirements for being on the site and it looks like they were met by the party and the candidates.

The Party of Socialism and  Liberation was on the NYS ballot in 2012.  They aren't listed on the quiz either.  Neither are their candidates.  Perhaps I am reading too much into the requirements.  I don't know how many state ballots the SP-USA and PSL were on in 2012. 

I like the "News" feature as well.  The socialist news sources are skimpy though.   We need to get more socialist news sources on this list so that people can get a different perspective on the capitalist controlled press. 

So,  I like the quiz in as much as it does have good questions with plenty of choices for answers and includes a good number of political parties that are outside the two capitalist controlled parties.  And the News feature is a nice touch on top of that.

My question:  Why are socialist parties not using this and getting involved with it?
It costs us no money at all,  unless we want to donate and support their work.
It does cost us some time for the party and candidates to fill out the questionnaire and submit a picture.

For however much time that takes we would get our information out to every person that takes the quiz or has taken the quiz and goes back to the site & keeps up on it. To date (April 15 2016) that is over 35.6 million people.  (How many do we get to talk to in a day? And this site is offering this to us for nothing?)

So,  let's get involved with it.  I looked into the history of the site and they have the whole site set up for the 2014 mid term election disaster.  (36% of the electorate participating.  Can we have a quorum rule for elections?  50 +1% must vote or the election results don't count.)  State specific elections and candidates were covered.  As long as they were on the ballot,  they were put into the quiz.

And what do we have to lose?  Some chains?