Primary Election Candidate Worksheet

How are you going to decide who to vote for this year for President? Are you going to decide based on the issues? How about the professional background and experience of the candidates? What about their personal and family lives? Will those features affect your decision?

DecideBetter! has created a downloadable spreadhseet in Microsoft Excel format that was designed to help you make your decision for the presidential primary, and is now in the process of revising this resource to assist you in determining which candidate you should vote for in the general election. By using the spreadsheet, you can determine how important the issues are to your decision, how important experience is to your decision, and how important personal backgrounds are to your decision. You can determine, based on which issues or qualities you think are the most important, which candidate should be the one you vote for.

Click here to download the Democratic primary spreadsheet (excel)

Click here to download the Republican primary spreadsheet (excel)

Basic Instructions for Using Spreadsheet:

1. Download the spreadsheet (Democratic Candidates or Republican Candidates, or both)
2. Assign a percentage value to each category (Issues, Professional Qualities and Personal Qualities). Your total should equal 100% for best results. For example, if you think you will base your vote 75% on the issues, enter 75% for Issues, then enter numbers for Professional Qualities and Personal Qualities, respectively, that add up to the remaining 25%.
3. Rank the items listed under each category (Issues, Professional Qualities and Personal Qualities) from 1-5 in the space provided, with 1 being that the item is not very important to you and 5 being that the item is very important to you.
4. Assign a value to how much you support or oppose the position/quality of each candidate on that particular item from -1 to 1, with -1 being that you don't support the position/quality for a particular item and candidate, 0 being that you neither support nor oppose the position/quality for a particular item and candidate, and 1 being that you support the position/quality for a particular item and candidate.
5. The totals will automatically be tallied to tell you which candidate you agree with and disagree with on each category of Issues, Professional Qualities and Personal Qualities, as well as the total of all three of these categories.
6. For best results, only enter information in the shaded boxes of the spreadsheet.

Do you need more information about where the candidates stand on the issues? Click here

Background on Decision-Making for Elections:

How do you make your decision? Based on the Issues? Based on the character and experience of the candidates?

You may be surprised, but even when most people think that they make their decisions based upon multiple issues that they agree with a particular candidate on, they are unwilling or unable to actually do the necessary research to clarify which candidate agrees with their positions on the issues. When they get to the voting booth, they tend to vote more on what they percieve the candidate's positions are rather than on what the candidate's positions actually are. And this isn't only true of uninformed voters or those who don't vote. This actually often applies to some of the most informed voters.

Do you really know what the differences between the candidates in the Democratic Primary or Republican Primary actually are? Or do you just think you know? Have you actually done the research yourself? Or are you relying on the media's views or perhaps the views of your friends or family?

Actually doing the research for oneself is time-consuming, but it is really the only way to truly determine which candidate you should case your vote for. If you don't do the research, you may just be speculating.