Johnson wins election if based on issues

What if people voted on what candidate aligned with them most closely on issues and not based on who the media gatekeepers thinks you should vote for? 

Here’s what the election map would look like....



The map is created off the results of over 600,000 quiz takers on the iSideWith site. Users answer 36 questions that cover a range of issues from social, environment, science, foreign policy, domestic policy, immigration, the economy, and healthcare. Their answers are matched up with the candidates answers and then they are shown who they align most closely with.

iSideWith generates state by state breakdowns so you can see which state supports which candidate. I tabulated the data and assigned the electoral votes to the winner of each state. iSideWith included a couple candidates in their questionnaire who will only be on the ballot in a handful of states so I excluded them, but I did include the Constitution, Democrat, Green, Libertarian, and Republican candidates.

The Results

Barack Obama, as the incumbent, wins a total of 217 electoral votes in 16 states. He wins the states you’d expect him to win - the west coast, north east and a few in the great lakes region.

Jill Stein (Green Party) beats out Obama in Vermont and Hawaii which are two of the most left leaning states and wins a total of 7 electoral votes.

Mitt Romney only wins 4 states - Utah, Alaska, South Dakota, and Alabama - and receives 21 votes.

Virgil Goode’s (Constitution Party) best showing was 3rd place in South Dakota, but generally placed in the back of the pack taking sixth in 43 states.

Ron Paul wins 3 states - Arizona, Wyoming, and North Dakota, but racked up the most second place finishes with 27. Paul received 17 electoral votes.

Gary Johnson (Libertarian Party) claims the title of President by collecting enough electoral votes to put him in the White House with 284 votes (270 is the magic number to win the presidency) by winning 28 states

My Thoughts

1. These results are what I would expect if the Commission of Presidential Debate gate keepers were to let Johnson into the debates, but as of right now they have set an arbitrary 15% threshold which instituted after Ross Perot almost upset the old party system when he was included in the debates when he was only polling at 7%. The debate appearances shot Perot up to 38% in the polls. Johnson would very likely follow Perot’s trajectory if Johnson was included in the general election debates.
2. When results are based on matching voters to candidates on issues you end up with minor parties winning some electoral votes because there is no wasted vote syndrome to deal with. You might expect a similar sort of result with alternative voting methods such as Ranked Choice Voting or Approval Voting with fully informed voters
3. The final question comes down to: Do we want a qualified candidate leading the country who 81.3% of question respondents agree with or someone with only 75% or 65% agreement?

Here is the spreadsheet with the calculations of the results based on iSideWith.com’s data as of July 18, 2012, at approximately 8PM ET.

[Note: updated map to fix some errors. ME and NV were marked as Obama winning, but Johnson was winner. WY was a tie for first with Paul/Johnson and IA was a tie for first with Obama/Johnson so these states are striped.]