Yesterday I did a diary on one of those Political Spectrum Tests. A number of people played along, and I thought it would be interesting to chart the results. The site makes that possible (if a little messy, with a large number of people), so this morning I plotted it all on their graph. Results below the Kleinur.
It was apparent from the responses that most of us clustered in the lower left corner of the graph. This was reinforced by the Poll results; of the 115 responses to my poll, 98 identified as Left/Libertarian, another 7 as Left. Another 4 labelled themselves "Off the Scale", which implies they were really far in that lower left direction. Then there were three "Middles", One Left/Authoritarian (I'm not really sure how you do that), and one Right/Authoritarian (Santorum voter, I guess).
Of course, that's not by any means a scientific sampling...those who chose to respond might be quite different from the population at large, or the population of Kos members. A quick sampling of random signature lines show a lot of negative numbers, reflecting responses from this test in the past, so I don't think it's too far out of line to say that the center of gravity of the group is somewhere in that lower left quadrant.
There are a number of other charts available on the site. One of them allows you to view the positions of the Senators of each state on the chart (in 2008). I crammed them all onto one chart for effect, here. Very disturbing. They are ALL upper right, we are predominantly lower left.
Then I plotted the positions of everyone that posted their results in the comments to yesterday's diary. I plotted some of the current politicians on the same chart (as analyzed by the authors of the site) for comparison. Some notes on that: They had Obama, as campaigning in 2008, and then Obama as he stands in 2012. Dramatic shift to the upper right. There are a number of ways to explain this, I suppose. The Republicans seem to be racing to that far right corner. Santorum seemed (to me, anyway) to be almost a caricature of some sort of uber-Republican. We all know that Romney has been all over the map, over the years, but he's chasing that same corner, now. Gingrich is there already, just because that's who he is. And the farther up and right the Republicans go, the farther the Democrats go in the same direction to appeal to the "Moderates" that are in between them.
So, I plotted both Obama's 2008 and 2012 positions on the chart, and you can imagine him to be wherever you want on the line in between. Paul is still out there all by himself...in fact it's interesting that the plot shows a consistent trend line from lower left to upper right. Anyone deviating off that line really seems to have some stand-out positions. But, in spite of the fact that several respondents yesterday felt like they were "outliers" or otherwise weird, they were all clustered pretty tightly into a little group on the lower left end of that line.
This chart is really busy. The way it is built on the site gave no options of moving names around, so they all run over each other. It does leave the option of checking boxes of some names and clearing things out so you can see better where you are, if you are interested. I tried to spell monikers correctly, and apologize if I got yours wrong. It defaults to a leading capital letter, and the rest lower case. I also shortened some of them, to cut down on the clutter a bit. The site rounds off your scores to one decimal place, even though I typed them in as you submitted them. With all that in mind, here is the chart.
Also, I feel remiss at leaving "Pie" off of yesterdays poll, and would like to correct that today.
And now, I realize that I should have linked to yesterday's diary, in case anyone wanted to refer back to it. So Here It Is.