I think I'm in the lower 5% of AU undergrads when it comes to knowledge about today's political issues. I don't watch presidential debates; I don't keep up with current events; I don't get all hot and bothered when I talk about politics. I would very much rather sit down, listen to music, and maybe go through youtube.com and watch the most ridiculous videos ever created. This is what is entertaining to me. This is what I like to do.
In thinking of what I could possibly blog about, I did a quick google blog search on "Politics for Dummies" and I was quickly referred to a rather interesting post from a said "elyzabeth." She writes about how she took this quiz that is supposed to be for people who maybe don't know much about politics, and they take the quiz and it tells which candidates they agree with the most and everything. The quiz can be found here.
The blogger gives us a disclaimer stating that "the best part about this quiz is that if you’re left-leaning at all, you’re pretty much guaranteed to wind up with Kucinich on top because, a candidate gets points for each position you agree wtih him/her on and, according to the comments section at Pandagon, Kucinich is the only one who gave a position for every question."
Now, I would consider myself more left leaning than right, so I was expecting whoever this Kucinich guy is to be at the top of my list... and I was right. Kucinich on top with Obama right below.
But it got me to thinking... what if someone just stumbled upon the quiz and was not informed of this disclaimer? And, do people really base their actual votes on the results from a survey they took online? I would hope the answer is no... but you know how people are. How do you think quizilla.com became popular? Because people love quizzes and people love what their results are. People abide by fortune cookies, and some even think that horoscopes from the Sunday paper will really tell you what's going on...
But now these quizzes might be influencing American politics. What if everyone who takes the quiz gets Kucinich and since they're a "dummie," they will vote for whatever the quiz tells them. In a nation with lazy people (like myself), they won't be watching a political debate and they won't be following up on current events. A quiz they can take in 3 minutes might hold a little more weight than anything else. God forbid if any candidate is behind the funding for some of these quizzes, because it could be masked pretty easily; no one would know.
What if the quiz taker is on the fence between voting Obama and Clinton? Should a quiz really dictate the decisions our fore fathers fought so hard to let us have for ourselves? Could we be seeing a Kucinich-run white house? I guess we'll just have to wait and see.
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Of all strange ways people decide who to vote for at least this one has a hint of sensibility. I once met a guy at a polling site sitting with the sample ballot laying enie menie minie mo, John Edwards ratings were always oddly high among women who could did not know his positions, and I am sure there are some cases of "Well, I always liked John Lennnon more tha George Harrison, I guess John Kerry it is"
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