Cats, weed, and outer space

A field guide to the 2016 scorecards you probably didn’t know about (until now)

By Darren Samuelsohn

December 16, 2015

Politico

Conventional wisdom already tells us how some voters are aligning in the 2016 election. Angry white people are rallying behind Donald Trump; country club Republicans are coming around to Marco Rubio. Women and minorities could punch Hillary Clinton’s ticket to the White House.

But what about the cat-lover vote? The space freaks?

Well, there’s a candidate for them, too. Civic-minded backers of all kinds of niche interests have already started creating their own measurements for the presidential field. We’re looking at you, construction workers – and gym rats, and potheads.

With primary season bearing down on us, dozens of groups, individuals and even some private companies are offering far-from-scientific ratings of the presidential hopefuls based on their own unique policy criteria. So who are their favorite candidates? We scoured the landscape to find out.

Pot (Pro): Bernie Sanders, Rand Paul

The Vermont senator is the only one in the 2016 field who can claim an ‘A’ grade from the Marijuana Policy Project, the advocacy group pushing for a major overhaul to the country’s drug laws. He had been holding a ‘B’ but got an upgrade after saying during the first Democratic debate that he would support a Nevada ballot initiative to legalize and regulate pot. Paul isn’t far behind, though. He maintains an ‘A-‘ due in part to bills he’s worked on that let state medical marijuana laws proceed without federal interference and for allowing pot-related businesses to access the commercial banking system. Huckabee also remains in the mix. He recently jumped from a ‘D-‘ to a ‘B’ after saying he supported a state’s right to establish its own pot policies, which he would let continue if elected president.

Pot (Anti): Ben Carson, Chris Christie, Marco Rubio

If liberalized drug laws aren’t your thing, then look no further than the presidential scorecard of Smart Approaches to Marijuana, a group fighting legalization efforts that’s led by former Rep. Patrick Kennedy, conservative columnist David Frum and Kevin Sabet, a former White House aide who the magazine High Times dubbed ‘the devil himself.’

Its October analysis put Carson, Christie and Rubio at the top of the 2016 pack based on their support for “an evidenced-based marijuana policy” that includes opposition to legalization, support for prevention, intervention and treatment for pot use while also backing the regulated FDA-approved approach to legitimate medical use of marijuana.

Evangelicals: Marco Rubio

The “evangelical insiders” polled by the Christian news site WORLD has been giving the Florida senator a steady edge ever since this monthly survey started in July. Rubio is at nearly 45 percent support among the 88 people who responded to the most recent poll published in November, with Ted Cruz cementing his standing as the group’s No. 2 pick. Front-runners Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton have barely registered.

Fearing God: Mike Huckabee

Rev. Steven Andrew of the USA Christian Church, a San Jose-based ministry that in 2012 called for a nationwide boycott against Starbucks over the company’s support for gay rights, scored the former Arkansas governor highest in his own personal voting guide that sizes up who he says is the “strongest to end the persecution of Christians.” How did Andrew come up with his score? In an email, the pastor said he compares news stories, current events and public statements with a series of “Biblical qualifications” that include fearing God, supporting religious liberty, telling the truth and “hat[ing] covetousness.”

Huckabee’s 93 percent score put him well ahead of his closest competitors, including Rand Paul, Ben Carson and Ted Cruz. Andrew gave ‘F’ grades to Clinton, Trump, Rubio and Jeb Bush, who he deemed as “biblically unqualified” for the presidency because they “do not fear God.”

Guns (pro): Ted Cruz, Jim Gilmore, Carly Fiorina, Rand Paul, Mike Huckabee

The Gun Owners of America’s political arm already awarded Cruz its endorsement. But it might be more of an attendance medal than a real grade: the conservative group noted in its press release that he was “the only one who has completed and returned the GOA presidential survey on the Second Amendment.”

Several other gun surveys are also in, however. Over at The Telegraph, former Virginia Gov. Jim Gilmore came out on top as the owner of the largest known gun collection (6), though Carly Fiorina can claim a tie if you count her husband’s weapons. Huckabee also is notable in these rankings when one combines his A+ NRA rating with his own pretty diverse personal gun collection, which includes multiple assault rifles. At the Bearing Arms blog, editor Bob Owens recently labeled Paul, Huckabee and former Texas Gov. Rick Perry as “Top Tier 2nd Amendment Candidates” for being “real shooters…not just on the campaign trail or in theory.”

Construction: Bernie Sanders

In case you missed it, the Vermont senator has been pitching a $1 trillion infrastructure plan. That’s a lot of new overpasses and bridges, which is why Sanders has the lead in this very unscientific survey by the industry trade publication “Construction Dive.” Its poll last month had Sanders holding a commanding lead with 54 percent support among 166 respondents. Trump, no slouch in the building world, came in second in the poll at 16 percent. Clinton, the holder already of several construction/labor union endorsements, was third with 13 percent. The Washington-based media website plans to keep its survey active during the campaign.

Common Core (Anti): Ted Cruz, Rand Paul

The conservative think tank American Principles in Action and its partners gave the senators from Texas and Kentucky the highest grades (A-) for their efforts to repeal the Common Core state-based education standards, as well as for their support for state and local decision-making and for backing tougher data security measures to protect student privacy. Trump came in with a ‘B-‘ because of several stump speeches slamming Bush’s work on Common Core and for calling the program a “disaster.” It also urged the billionaire to be more specific about what he’d do on the education front: “The candidate who does this will engender the gratitude of parents and other citizens. Trump would do well to blaze the trail on this.”

Cat lovers: Bernie Sanders and Lindsey Graham

The Scratching Post blog deserves kudos for its one-of-a-kind analysis of the presidential candidates’ views on animal rights issues. The site, run by the Tree House Humane Society, a Chicago-based shelter that focuses on stray cats, doesn’t pick favorites. But it does give a pretty thorough rundown based off candidate statements, voting records and ratings from the Humane Society Legislative Fund.

So who came out on top among the active presidential field?

Sanders’s 100 rating from the HSLF put him atop the Democratic slate, though the senator does get dinged for his floor vote favoring the Bipartisan Sportsmen’s Act of 2014 that would have allowed sports hunting and trapping on federal lands. Among the Republicans, Graham got the most glowing review thanks to a 38 HSLF score tied in part to his co-sponsorship of a bill that would have permanently prohibited the slaughter of horses for human consumption.

English teachers: Ted Cruz and Bernie Sanders

The presidential candidates haven’t been asked (yet) to diagram sentences or explain the symbolism behind The Great Gatsby. But when it comes to the grade level of their speaking, there’s been plenty of analysis to date demonstrating the 2016 field might want to take some remedial classes in the English language, including my colleague Jack Shafer’s take on Trump earlier this summer. So who should a word-lover get behind? The kind folks over at the Mashoid blog assessed the linguistic skills of all the 2016 hopefuls, plus Presidents Obama and George W. Bush and Joe Biden.

Actually, it was Biden who came out on top in their study, which looked at the approximate reading level of the words in seven recent speeches, as well as the number of syllables per word and word length. But among the actual presidential candidates, the “most literate” prize goes to Cruz, a Harvard Law School alumnus whose recent speeches contained words at a reading level of nearly an 11th grader.

Notably, Trump came in dead last, with a computed reading level a little beyond a 7th grader. “Listen to him speak,” the blog noted, “and it’s clear immediately the results are accurate: Along with a propensity to blurt out inappropriate comments, he prefers simple sentence structures, overuses qualifiers such as ‘very’ and ‘really,’ and sticks to basic words.”

Space geeks: Marco Rubio, Ted Cruz and Martin O’Malley

The 2016 field hasn’t had to weigh in yet on Area 51, or take sides in the eternal divide between Star Wars and Star Trek.

But two space-minded blogs do take on the difficult-to-answer question of who among the presidential candidates would be best for space policy—challenging in large part because so little has been said on the topic.

At Inverse magazine, Cruz gets the nod for his advocacy of manned and unmanned space exploration. But writer Bryan Kelly also added a caveat for Democrats who can’t bring themselves to vote for the Texan. O’Malley, he writes, “sounds downright enthusiastic about marrying the public goal of space exploration with private sector efforts to move skyward.”

Over at Thrilllist.com, space gets the full 14-candidate countdown with Rubio in the No. 1 slot, with a warning that the Sunshine State senator has been using language that “might be a bit too supportive.” Those are references to a Rubio remark that he was up for “placing boots on the ground, on Mars” and for a May tweet that he would “use American power to oppose any violations of international waters, airspace, cyberspace, or outer space.”

Ad men: Mike Huckabee
The folksy former Fox commentator carried the day in a survey asking 250 branding, marketing and ad professionals who had the best campaign slogan. Huckabee won perhaps because of his motto’s folksiness: “From Hope to Higher Ground.”

The poll, conducted by the Folsom, Calif.-based consulting firm TagLineGuru, placed Sanders second with his “A Political Revolution is Coming” slogan, followed by Christie came in third with his “Telling it like it is” trademark.

Cyber-Cops: Ben Carson, Jeb Bush, Chris Christie, Martin O’Malley, Rick Santorum

Presidential campaigns are a treasure trove of exclusive information, and their websites collect valuable donor and voter data. Chinese hackers in 2008 demonstrated as much when they hacked into the networks for both Obama and his Republican rival John McCain in search of internal data on U.S. policy.

In 2016, Carson’s campaign site was the only one to earn an A grade as the least likely to be hacked, in a recent survey published by the Illinois-based InfoSec Institute. It praised the Republican for his simple enough website, which outsourced its donation and volunteer services and doesn’t have a store selling campaign schwag. “From a security perspective, this approach helps reduce the site’s attack surface and makes it more difficult for hackers to mount an attack against it,” the report said.

But another analysis released in September by the nonprofit Online Trust Alliance didn’t see Carson’s site in the same light, noting it had a privacy policy like many of his Democratic and GOP rivals stating it could share information voluntarily given to the campaign with other like-minded groups. In all, the OTA survey faulted 17 of the 23 campaigns it studied, basing their findings on the sites’ privacy practices, overall server security and consumer protection practices. The campaigns that didn’t fail this test were Bush, Christie, O’Malley and Santorum.

Tchotchke salesmen: Rand Paul

Clinton has won kudos for her $30 ‘Everyday Pantsuit’ T-shirt, and Bush has gotten grief for the strange branding around a $75 guacamole bowl. But, judging by a stream of glowing media reports, the Kentucky senator has won the schwag vote. His campaign store has been given top billing by the likes of Bustle, Business Insider, Cleveland.com and ABC News for the stuff he sells on his site, including an ‘NSA Spy Cam Blocker’ ($15) and a three-foot birthday card ($35) featuring the senator clad in suit and tie. “There’s something for everyone in Rand Paul’s batshit-crazy store,” the Concourse blog wrote in October.

Anti-immigration voters: Rick Santorum

The former Pennsylvania senator is the only 2016 candidate to earn an A grade from NumbersUSA, which sizes up the field based on issues like preventing illegal border entries and surges, ending the 14th Amendment’s automatic birthright citizenship clause and opposing work permits for illegal immigrants. Both Trump and Cruz aren’t far behind. They get A-minus grades from the group, which has helped over the last two decades challenging bipartisan efforts to overhaul immigration laws. Of course, voters who support more immigration might want to see who’s on the bottom of the chart. Those spots are occupied by Democrats and Lindsey Graham: Clinton and the South Carolina GOP senator get an F, while Sanders and O’Malley both notched a truly dismal F-minus.

Medicaid expansion: Hillary Clinton, Chris Christie*, John Kasich, Martin O’Malley, Bernie Sanders, Donald Trump.

New York-based BeneStream is a private startup that banks off Obamacare’s employer mandate by helping businesses shift their eligible low-wage workers into Medicaid. Its 2016 voting scorecard is a pretty simple display of who supports an expansion to the entitlement program. All the Democratic candidates still in the race are featured with a big green YES next to their images, as are Kasich and Trump. Christie, meantime, scores a ‘YES, but…’ for a campaign platform signaling support for states getting a set amount of Medicaid funding tied to the number of its enrollees.

Gym rats: Martin O’Malley

Flyte Fitness, an exercise and workout training company based in New York, offers up its own creative assessment of the presidential candidates by measuring them based on which has the most athletic-minded Facebook fans. O’Malley, he of the six-pack abs and willingness to be photographed bare-chested, came out just ahead of both Kasich and Fiorina. The former Maryland governor can claim to have more than 26 percent of his social media followers on the site falling into the “Healthy and Fit” category.

“Of course this isn’t in any way scientific, as supporters differences in income, geography and age could skew the findings quite a bit,” Jeremy Greenberg, the company’s co-founder and CEO, wrote in an October blog post accompanying his survey. “But it’s still fun to look at!”

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Cats, Weed, and Outer Space

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