Research & Development

Pigeonholed Party Politics

2020/08/27

Our R&D efforts into predictive modeling are well underway, so we wanted to share an exciting update on the latest development of Bullseye. Last month we showed off how well Bullseye can predict preferences of more than 4,000 different authors, music artists, and brands while knowing only a small handful of actual preferences.

 

This month, we set Bullseye on voters to see what it can tell us about voter preferences across a wide suite of policy, cultural, political, and financial issues. And by issues, we mean actual, deep, real-life, nitty-gritty issues that matter to Americans such as fracking, Confederate flags, gender identity, and childcare. Oh, what a time it is to be an American.

 

Bullseye must have known that we are all tired of explaining everything in terms of partisan differences, and revealed two new dimensions that are far more interesting than the overtired political paradigm of left and right.

 

Protection Dimension

  • On one side of this dimension are voters who are more likely to support woke policies that protect and advocate for the most vulnerable in society even if the solution is market based. They want immigrants to receive basic services like healthcare and education, funding shifted from police departments to social services, and are highly supportive of school privatization and charter schools.  
  • On the other side are voters who don’t want any type of unsolicited protection. They are against background checks for guns, whistleblower protections, prescription drug price caps, and are supportive of insurance providers charging higher rates for pre-existing conditions.

Superpower Dimension

  • This dimension can be understood as the role that voters think the US should play in the world. On one side are the voters who want to see domestic solutions to global problems such as climate change, reducing trash pollution, decreasing the trade deficit, and additional COVID-19 funding.
  • And on the other side are voters who want the US to be a responsible and engaged diplomatic player by re-entering the WHO, Paris Climate Accord, and granting statehood to Puerto Rico. This dimension also places a high value on guaranteeing low-cost education for all students.