Everyone’s trying to figure out who will be the best candidate to put up against Obama in 2012. So far, we’re far from having a clue. The Republican party seems a bit far apart on who the consensus front runner is. There’s been several straw polls and a different winner for nearly every single one.
So who’s the TRUE front-runner? This may be a good way to find out.
My friend and colleague Scott Graves (@scottgraves, founder of TheLibertyLab.com) recently launched an online portal of content and activity related to the tea party movement called MyTeaParty.org in which he introduces a new application tracking the pulse of the Tea Party movement.
He describes it as:
a collaboration to develop an online polling tool that will help the public and the media better understand the sentiment of the tea party movement as America approaches a critical presidential election cycle.
It reminds me a lot of the “Facemash” app developed by Mark Zuckerberg (seen in the movie “Social Network”), in which he single handedly takes down Harvard’s servers due to the viral nature of the “choose who’s hotter” application.
So far the Tea Party Straw Poll application hasn’t disappointed with over 1.5 million votes in just over a week’s time. I think this has good potential to get a very accurate account of what people’s sentiments are about the potential candidates.
So How does it work?
This poll gauges such support using a unique “run-off” matchup model. It is designed to elicit deeper preferences from voters and make it much more difficult for well-organized campaigns to “game” the system. The results below reflects the percentage of times a candidate was preferred in a head-to-head “run-off” against other potential candidates. We also suspect they more accurately reflect the true pulse of the tea party movement than those cited by the mainstream media.
So far here are the results we’ve seen. 1,627,821 votes and counting:
Want to cast your votes? Go for it…The 2012 Tea Party Straw Poll
