So, as we all know, I'm a rigid, insufferable person with very high standards, who obsesses over some issues while barely caring about others. And in light of my "not caring" post, I felt like I should share a bit into my processes in navigating between the many candidates in the democratic primary of 2019-2020.
I had two major metrics that I used in varying points during the primaries. I even mentioned one of them in some of my 2019 posts. That said, I'm now going to share how I used to evaluate candidates and how well I feel these metrics worked. Are metrics like this perfect? No. Sometimes what the heart thinks cannot perfectly be quantified. But it does give some insight into how I weight different issues.
Metric 1: Early primary
This metric I used in the early primary when there were like 20 different candidates, and I wanted to sort through them efficiently. This metric is a bit more vague, and it's my first attempt at one. No candidate gets a perfect score, but it did clearly sort the different candidates into classes. This metric was out of 100 points, and it should give you an idea of how I thought of different candidates.
Basic income- 10 points
UBI is my big issue so it makes sense I would give it its own category for some form of purity test.
Medicare for all- 10 points
Same thing, big pet issue, gets its own consideration
Economic issues- 10 points
This is for all other economic issues. Minimum wage, union support, workplace democracy, etc. I looked at platforms other than my key issues (which got their own weighting as shown above) and measured candidates on conformity to my ideal. Which was basically, bernie's platform as before the last few months I'd describe my ideology as "Bernie with UBI"
Social/domestic- 10 points
I measured social policy progressivism on a scale of 10 points. This included stuff like abortion, gay marriage, as well as idpol issues.
Foreign- 10 points
I measured foreign policies, looking for someone with fairly progressive stances on issues.
Ideology- 20 points
You were probably wondering why I weighed policy so lightly. Well, what's more important to me than individual policies, outside of my big pet projects, is the idea that the candidate actually sees the world the same way i do. I believe that the core assumptions people make about the world matters and that at the end of the day, someone who agrees with me on worldview is going to do right by me more than someone who professes a certain policy. It also serves as an overall metric of how I feel about the candidate, their vision, and a summation of their policies.
Commitment/history- 20 points
This is a measure of how committed they are to their policy platform. I needed to create a sniff test for 2020 given all the "look at me, I support Bernie like policies" type candidates. There were a lot of fakers merely pivoting left out of political convenience to muscle into Bernie's territory, without actually caring about ideas. So, I wanted to look at their history and their commitment to the issues and ideals and their behavior more than anything here.
Experience/competence- 10 points
This is a measure of how much political experience they had and how competent they are at implementing their ideas. After all, a neophyte might have good ideas but if they don't have good plans to pay for them and implement them, that doesn't mean much does it?
How it worked in practice
This gave me a score out of 100 points for all candidates. The highest scorer was Bernie Sanders, who had 88 points. He had a near perfect score, but lost 10 points for not supporting a UBI, and 2 points for having a slightly different ideology for me (also UBI related). The dude got as high as a non UBI supporter could get.
Yang, my second choice who I had serious questions of supporting over Sanders due to UBI, M4A, and human centered capitalism, ended the primary with a 74. That's the second highest score, but he had a few core deficiencies. His big issue was him backing off of medicare for all over time, which caused him to lose points in the way Bernie lost points for not supporting UBI. He also was a weaker candidate at times, getting imperfect scores on ideology, commitment, and competence. Still, I really liked Yang, so he did pretty good.
Marriane Williamson got a 72. That's pretty good. But, she was kind of all over the place, and she failed the competence test. Still, she was #3.
Warren and Gabbard spent much of the race in the 60s, but dropped to the 50s toward the end. Warren's big problem was her "snake" like nature, stabbing Bernie in the back, and backing off of issues. I admit I was unfair toward her, as I lowered her M4A score and her M4A is as robust as Bernie's. Gabbard is overrated among the Bernie bro left. But she's still more progressive than a lot of the flock.
Going further down, you had Harris with a 44, Buttigieg with a 39, Klobuchar with a 37, and Biden with a 29. Yeah, Biden played the centrist wing hard and I ripped him for it.
Generally speaking, I had four major tiers of candidates.
Tier 1 candidates were candidates I liked and would enthusiastically vote for. I would say these candidates started at 70 points, and included Sanders, Yang, and Williamson
Tier 2 candidates were candidates I kind of liked but saw as more flawed. They normally scored in the 50s and 60s, and included Warren and Gabbard.
Tier 3 candidates were who I called fauxgressives. They traditionally scored in the 40s and 50s but given my downgrading of Warren and Gabbard, this could be shifted down to the 40s. These were the "fake" progressives who had some progressive ideas but failed my progressive sniff test.
Tier 4 candidates were the outright centrists and scored in the 30s are lower. These guys tried to piss me off in their orientation and are the types who would make me yell at my screen "JOIN THE REPUBLICAN PARTY ALREADY." These include Biden, Daleney, Bloomberg, and people like that.
For the SJWs: How much social issues impacted my score
Social issues would have had remarkable sway if dealing with someone who was flat out illiberal. Say a "nazbol" ran on my perfect platform, how would they score?
Well, UBI and M4A would both be 10s. Economic issues a 10. Social issues a 0, so losing 10 points there. Foreign policy issues, well, it depends on what a nazbol foreign policy looks like. Assuming it's perfect a 10 but a hyper nationalist would probably get like a 5 in practice due to being too nationalist. Ideology I would give them like a 12/20. While I weigh economic issues more heavily, I wouldn't be overlooking the social stuff much. On commitment, same thing, like 12 at best, due to the horrid record on social issues. Competence, 10. So....social issues, taken to extremes, could have influenced my score by as much as 31 points, leading to getting a 69 in practice. While a 69 is higher than what most craplibs would have gotten, basically on the upper part of tier 2, that still would make a hypothetical nazbol candidate competitive. While such a candidate certainly would not get a perfect score and any actual progressive would blow such a candidate out of the water, if the alternative was a craplib with a score of 45, it's quite clear who the winner would be. Still, given a candidate in practice would often have typical flaws regarding experience, ideology, commitment issues (yeah Tucker Carlson would get a 0 in practice), and likely fall short on various policy metrics, at most your typical nazbol is going to roughly equal your typical craplib.
The fact is though, in practice, given this was aimed at the democratic primary, the results were far less sensitive. AT MOST social issues influenced my score by about 10 points in practice (normally factoring in by 3-5 points) and most of my focus was on economics.
Just for fun: How would a literal moderate republican score?
So the democratic and republican parties are....splitting, and merging. It's the end of an alignment. Assuming the dems go full neocon, how would one of those candidates score?
UBI: 0, M4A:, 0, economics: 0, social: 10 (I mean they're a craplib after all), foreign policy: 5 at most, ideology: 4, commitment: 0, experience, 10.
In this sense, a literal craplib with republican economic views and potentially foreign policy views would get like a 29 at most. Yeah, it really does mirror how important economics is vs how important social policy is. Even with a perfect foreign policy and adjusted ideological scores, he would still only get like a 36 or something. The fact is, at the extremes, social issues account for up to 30 points or so, and economic views up to 70. Given my hyper focus on economics, this metric seems more than fair and rounded.
Flaws with the methodology in retrospect
So how did this metric do? Well, I see two problems. The first issue is with me. I feel like I was too emotional and subject to the news cycles and tended to downgrade people too much. Looking at my scores, Warren probably deserves better than a 53, and Biden is crap, but he's arguably 40s material at this point. I mean my hypothetical craplib with republican economics scored better than what I gave him.
Second, I may have focused too high on stuff like dedication to the issues and not enough on competence. Williamson is based ideologically, but she's not really qualified to be president IMO. It also wouldn't kill the metric to give reasonably qualified but ideologically flawed candidates a few more points.
On the flip side, I think the weighting of social vs economic issues is perfect and even generous to social issues.
If I were to go over the candidates again now that the passions of the election season have worn off, this is how I would score them now:
Bernie- 86
I would lower Bernie's ideology score a little bit given my more recent personal developments.
Yang- 74
Yang is a bit weaker due to lack of policy experience, backing off of M4A, and a few minor policy imperfections but he's still decent.
Williamson- 68
I'm spitballing here, but I still give Williamson fairly high Yang like scores. I'm not sure of her commitment to various issues, and she lacks experience, but Orb Mommy is based and deserves a decent score by this metric.
Warren- 62
I have to give her props for Medicare for all but other than that my opinion of her is largely unchanged. She should be in the 70s but she lost a lot of street cred with me over the last year or two.
Gabbard- 57
She's not terrible, but she doesn't stand out and her weird social positions cost her a few points. For the record social justice issues DO influence my scoring here. By maybe 5 points.
Harris- 42
Yeah, she kinda deserved a low score.
Biden- 40
Yeah, I was a LITTLE too hard here. His blatant pandering toward the centrists turned me off, but he's not AS bad as I rated him here. And this was candidate Biden, not president Biden. President Biden actually might get a bit higher. If I were to judge biden on job performance now, I'd give him closer to a 52 or something. He's doing better than expected, getting up to the tier 3 "fauxgressive" level in practice. Still lacking in many areas, but better than expected.
All in all...it was a decent methodology. Given the nature of 2020 and how there were a lot of candidates faking it and pretending to be more left than they were, it was good to have a sniff test. But I think I focused a little too much on ideological conformity and dedication to the issues, and not enough on competence. Competence matters more than shown here, and Williamson doing better than Warren, while understandable, is a bit cringey, given Williamson barely had a platform and Warren, despite being a snake, had tons of detailed policies that I value.
Had I weighted stuff a little differently and focused more on competence and a little less on character issues, I think it would've been better. It might mean the craplibs and fakers did a bit better, but it would also still mean that their scores would be MUCH lower than indicated here. I ultimately had the right idea, but I just didn't implement the ideology well and i weighted things a bit differently than I arguably should have.
All in all next time maybe I'll go with:
UBI: 10
M4A: 10
Economic issues: 10
Social issues: 10
Foreign policy issues: 5
Ideology: 20
Commitment: 15
Experience/competence: 20
Not sure how exactly I'll weigh it, but I think downplaying foreign policy since I care about it less and struggled to give people a good rating here might be wise. Also, I'd potentially reduce commitment to the cause a bit given it's kind of redundant with ideology. And I'd buff competence to ensure the candidates are qualified, this would likely make up for the foreign policy adjustment too since I care more about simply being competent at that job rather than an actual ideological agenda. This is tentative and I'll play around with it in 2024, but it's a good measure just needs some slight improvements.
Metric 2: Late primary/general
Moving toward the general, I shifted toward a different metric, which was far more detailed, and I only applied it to general election candidates, as well as Bernie and Yang. On this metric, I focused exclusively on an economic issues purity test, weighting issues as I felt they were important to me. It should be noted that I tried to capture a wide range of potential policies, and it was not designed to give anyone a perfect score. Obviously some progressives are going to pick and choose priorities, so I simply wanted to see who scored highest on my progressive wishlist weighted in terms of how important the issues are to me.
This metric was out of 200 points. Again, no one has to score 200 and no one really got close. I would say 100 would be my threshold for support though. The metric was weighted where any candidate worth their salt would HAVE TO get a minimum of 100 for me to like them, with a really good one getting around 150 or so. Let's see how I did this.
Basic income: 50 points
I really went nuts on UBI as it IS my big thing and supporting it DOES get a lot of clout with me.
Medicare for all: 50 points
Medicare for all was arguably as important as UBI and given UBI was really just an out there wish list, M4A was the big issue I was focusing on. The thing is, this metric was made where if you supported both and nothing else, you would get 100 points. Because that's what I care most about and that's what my ideal vision is. BUT, I gave 100 points of other options just to make it fair. And given I do give partial credit for partial implementations of ideas, it seems perfectly fair.
Combatting Climate Change: 25 points
As I said, I went to that Bernie rally, it kind of affected me, and I decided "hey, climate change is a big deal, I might be here to save the planet and stop these stupid flesh monkeys from killing themselves, so I should prioritize this." So it got 25 points.
Jobs program: 10 points
A nod to the green new deal and consolation prize as an alternative to UBI.
Free college: 10 points
Should probably be higher but eh, it is what it is. Technically my #3 issue if I dont count climate change.
Abolish student debt: 10 points
To be fair college gets 20 points due to me making this separate category, so it's weighted fairly well.
Get money out of politics: 10 points
I mean it is important, and it is my wish list.
Electoral reform: 10 points
Yeah reform is an important as college roughly. So many competing priorities.
Minimum wage increase: 5 points
I mean, it's basically a band aid consolation prize for lack of UBI. It should arguably be higher in retrospect but everyone seemed for it so it wasn't a good measure for differentiating candidates.
Redo FLSA: 5 points
We need modern labor standards, again we're still operating on 1940s framework.
Paid sick leave/vacation time/family leave: 5 points
Another nice to have.
Strengthen unions: 5 points
Doesnt mean much in practice but another nice consolation prize to purity test people on
Support codetermination: 5 points
A nod to market socialism, baby!
How it worked in practice
The maximum score anyone can get is 200. But that would mean supporting every policy which would be impossible.
Biden scored a 93 at the time, just short of my threshold. In retrospect, looking at the scores, I feel like I was too generous. I gave him 20 points for a crappy public option that was way weaker than even medicare extra in the M4A category, and in retrospect he probably should've scored lower. I was too generous on his climate change plan, which in practice seemed a bit weaker than Bernie's, Yangs' or Hawkins'. And honestly, while he theoretically supported a lot of the small issues, racking up 5s and 10s here and there, in retrospect, these 5s, outside of maybe minimum wage, feel toothless. I mean he supports unions. What does that mean in practice? Same with a modern FLSA update, he supported labor law improvements, but likely not on the scale I would ask for like consistent schedules and greatly improving the gig economy. The fact is, I feel like I was way too generous to Biden here. Like I was trying to justify giving him a vote, but even with all my generosity, I still couldn't. He only got a 93. In practice I probably should've went lower to like an 80 or so.
For reference, Trump got a 0. No surprise there. He's crap. For as much as I dunk on democrats, don't think I'm any friend of republicans. Sanders and Yang, who I included just as a point of reference, scored 145 and 132 respectively. Bernie's score is perfectly earned. He supported everything but UBI, and I knocked a couple points off of his climate plan. So he's the standard by which to judge candidates. Yang...got a 132. And like Biden, I feel like I may have been overly generous at times. Too many healthcare points when the dude didn't even have a public option plan by the end of his candidacy. Actually scored lower than Biden on stuff but due to his UBI support did better. Yang is...not a very strong candidate. On paper I love his ideology, but without UBI, he kind of falls into craplib territory in terms of his actual in practice policies. He just gets a lot of leeway because of his UBI plans. Well that is why I supported Bernie at the end of the day. It came down to Yang for UBI or Bernie for everything else and I went with Bernie for everything else.
Howie Hawkins is interesting. He got a 168 which is insanely high. This is because he had Bernie's effective platform (minus a couple minor things), but he also nominally supported UBI in NIT form, which I acknowledged and gave him credit for. The problem with Hawkins is while he was smarter than Stein, there is NO WAY he could pay for ALL of his proposals well. So simply throwing out a progressive wishlist and hoping for the best isn't always the best approach.
Speaking of which...
Just for fun, how would I score myself?
Even I wouldn't give myself a perfect score. Again, progressives need to pick and choose priorities. And I also pick and choose priorities. I wouldn't do perfectly on every aspect of this list. So that said, how would my own current platform do?
UBI: 50
M4A: 30 (assuming Medicare extra for all support, still unsure if I support that full on M4A plan I came up with)
Climate change: 15 (given I support something Biden or Yang-esque)
Jobs program: 5 (Id likely support some jobs program for infrastricture/climate change but not massively)
Free college: 10
Abolish student debt: 10
Get money out of politics: 10
Electoral reform: 10
Min wage increase: 3 (if we have UBI we don't need $15 an hour, although I would still compromise and say $10-12)
Redo FLSA: 3 (not sure if needed given UBI but I still would support some changes)
Paid sick leave/vacation time/parental leave: 4 (not sure how much vacation time I would be mandating given UBI's possibility to have workers negotiate for that, also, UBI itself potentially causing a slight work disincentive).
Strengthen unions: 5
Support codetermination: 3 (not sure how needed it would be given UBI but I'd still support it somewhat)
A lot of the proposals I'm weak on I'm weak on because I believe UBI would do the job better. And ME4A would be a cheaper public option instead of medicare for all, so I would lose points by my own purity test. I think 30 is a good score for such a plan given its obvious drawbacks. It's slightly more than half credit but still leaves room for improvement.
Total: 148
That seems kind of low given I'd easily support my own platform over Bernie's but barely score better than Bernie. I also score less than Hawkins who simply had an unrealistic wish list. That said whoa boy, I got some major flaws to discuss in practice.
What are the flaws with this methodology
While I like the idea of a progressive wish list, I do not like this methodology in practice. While I feel the weighting of UBI and M4A specifically were fine, I feel like I focused too much on "making up" for my obvious top priorities by throwing out tons of 5-10 point consolation prizes. Outside of minimum wage, which should've really been 10 points instead of 5, the 5 point ones were worthless and shouldn't have even been included. Climate change I feel like should've been reduced to 20 from 25. Free college was fine. I also would've rather introduced some more important progressive ideas I've been discussing lately that aren't even on here like free childcare/preK (should be 10 points), housing policy (10 points), etc.
Second of all, the problem with a wishlist is that a candidate who is flawed like Hawkins and likely couldn't deliver on his promises suddenly gains tons of points. And someone like myself, tends to do weaker on my own metric because I don't pass all of these silly minor purity tests I try to give candidates alternatives to because they don't support UBI. Like, it just seems to work poorly in practice. Even if I dont pass every metric with flying colors, I should at least beat the actual candidates i dont have as strong of an ideological agreement with. Same with Biden. He didn't deserve as high as he was in practice. I was too generous with allowing candidates to score high on toothless issues that dont matter much for me. Even worth 5 points each if you have 5 issues like that, it just screwed things up. That said how would I fix this? Well, let's try something like this.
UBI: 30
M4A: 25
Climate change/Infrastructure: 15
Free college/student debt: 15
Minimum wage: 5
Housing: 5
Childcare/PreK: 5
This would be simplified and out of 100. It seems like a much more robust metric. UBI is a big deal for me and given I recently debated M4A vs UBI and sided with UBI, I'm lowering M4A slightly. Still my #2 though.
Just running the numbers now:
Biden: 30
Bernie: 70
Yang: 65
Hawkins: 80
Myself: 78+ (depending on policy implementations)
That seems better. Still has somewhat of the wishlist problem (see: Hawkins) but it seems a little reduced. The only problem is that in 2024 some of these issues might no longer be relevant given Biden will take action on hopefully a few of them. I'm imagining 2024 will be focusing on the big stuff Biden missed from me.
Overall
Both metrics seem valuable. Metric 1 seems to be a more "objective" metric focusing on a broad array of issues and is a more overview of how well candidates compare with me. The metric was solid, but I was a bit kneejerky with its subjective implementation at times. Also I focused too much on ideology and character issues over competence. Still, solid metric. And for the SJWs out there, yeah, being bad on social issues could make a difference by as much as 30 points if we're dealing with a literal nazbol. Economics still highly influences the other 70 and I know that might not be popular with them, but hey, that's about as fair of a weighting as I can get it. Any craplib who tries in a half baked way should beat a nazbol candidate in practice.
Metric 2 is more of a progressive wishlist and it seems flawed in practice. I was too generous to candidates who sucked with it, with me throwing out too many token issues that are quite frankly low priority and those heavily influencing how I viewed candidates. Biden should've scored much lower in practice. And Hawkins just had a progressive wish list but likely would've experienced taxation issues implementing all of those policies. Meanwhile even I struggle to beat hawkins at my own metric since my own self imposed compromises hurt me more than Hawkins just throwing out "I support this this this this and this but am fuzzy with paying for them". So, nice metric, but it needs work.
But yeah, that should give you an idea of what I think about candidates and how I will move forward for future elections. I may end up modifying these metrics a bit before then, but it is good to analyze them as I did. This was an exercise worth doing.
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