Cool website of the day: choose your candidate with Glassbooth Election 2008

Check out the Glassbooth Election 2008 website, which "connects you to the 2008 presidential candidate that represents your beliefs the best" using an interactive poll. It's not a deep study of the candidates and it's not meant to be, but it's definitely a user-friendly broad introduction to the candidates. I like how it asks you to tailor your priorities as a voter and then adjusts its questions accordingly. My strongest priority, is of course, the Long War and foreign policy.

I took the poll three times while tweaking my priorities, and interestingly, I matched up best with Mike Huckabee the first two times when I mixed domestic and foreign policy issues, which surprised me since I only know him through the media as an evangelical and I'm not religious (though I am a progressive, which is related). Second and third place flip-flopped between John McCain and Barack Obama. The third time, when my only priority was Iraq and foreign policy, John McCain was the runaway favorite with Huckabee 2nd and Obama 3rd. Basically, I'm liberal (foreign aid and humanitarian missions, diplomatic relations) and hawkish (win the war!) on foreign affairs and liberal (healthcare, unions, education, etc) in domestic politics.

I'll probably tweak my priorities some more and make a few more runs in the glassbooth. I'd love to try out similar websites if they're out there.

Thanks to tdaxp for the tip.

Update: In the comments of tdaxp's post, there's a referral to another candidate-matching website: selectsmart.com. In it, of the candidates still running, Obama (3rd) and Clinton (4th) tied for the lead as 'my' candidate , while McCain (6th) was slightly behind. In contrast to glassbooth, Mike Huckabee was a distant 14th. My guess is that the discrepancy stems from the simplified priority adjustor that fails to account for how much I'm weighting my foreign policy beliefs over my domestic beliefs in the 2008 election.

Eric