Somehow or other I came across this survey, a series of questions designed to place you with regard to current political party platforms and presidential candidates. I almost never take things like this since I always find many of the questions unanswerable as stated. And in general don’t feel they accomplish much.

But I took this one, sitting around one day. There were 40 questions in 8 categories. A number of these I had to leave blank – most of those in the economic section as I simply don’t know enough to have a view, and a few in the foreign policy section (ditto, or because possible answers were too conditional).

This one seemed slightly different in one respect in that it had an answer for each question called “choose another stance,” which when clicked brought up several other possible responses. Also, part of the question involved ranking your sense of its significance (how the algorithm works for all this is of course always one of the crucial aspects).

I took it twice in fact, the second time trying to answer a few more questions. The first time, my results were as follows. They are listed as a percentage of how much I apparently agree with the views, those asked about anyway (more on this later) of the respective candidates.

Stein (Green Party): 98%
Anderson (Justice): 87% [never even heard of this party…]
Johnson (Libertarian): 62%
Obama (Democrat): 57%
Romney (Republican): 0% [hmm]

The second time I took it, with no more than a few added responses, the results were:

Stein: 94%
Johnson: 75%
Anderson: 73%
Obama: 68%
Romney: 1%

Also, apparently I agree with Vermont voters 51% of the time on these questions and American voters 50% of the time.

Lessons to be learned in a subsequent post. But for now, it’s worth pointing out that, in fact, there are definitely “conservative” (in the deeper, older sense of the word) aspects to my political profile. A preference for slower, organic change, whenever remotely possible. A cherishing of the Constitution. A lack of enthusiasm for identity politics. And plenty of others, none of which, it seems ever get measured by these sorts of surveys.