The Republican Problem?
Yesterday I took the Political Spectrum Quiz that popped up in my Facebook feed from a friend. After answering fifty or so questions the app puts you on a two-by-two matrix with left-right and authoritarian-libertarian axes. This is where I came out:
I wasn’t surprised by where I ended up on the matrix. What did surprise me was that the average of all the people who have taken the quiz was almost identical to my score. The results are probably highly skewed since the population answering the quiz is (I think) quite skewed, but the results reflect the population none the less.
What I found really interesting were the two graphs below. As part of the quiz people can self identify as Democrats or Republicans. My score puts me firmly in the Democrat camp and again wasn’t a surprise. What was a surprise was the wide scatter in the Republican chart. Thinking back to the Presidential Election I do remember some very divergent views from Republicans, and the graph below bears that out. Clearly a right-of-center message is going to resonate, but the wide left-right and up-down scatter suggests that finding a ‘message’ that resonates with the different wings of the party will continue to be very challenging, and that it is highly likely that alienation of large numbers of voters will happen if ‘hard line’ stances continue to be taken. In the UK, Tony Blair’s New Labour project redefined the Labour Party for a new era and a new set of voters. Maybe the Republicans need to do something similar? Just my 2c.
