matthewheston / candidate_comparison Goto Github PK

I'm trying to begin thinking about how we could use technology to help people think about and compare political candidates. At least in presidential elections, candidates also have an "Issues" page on their website where they talk about issues they care about and their policy plans to address those issues. But it's not always easy to compare what issues different candidates are talking about and how they're talking about them. I'm interested in using different techniques, ranging from very simple to more sophisticated, to help voters engage in this comparative task.

Not too much. To begin addressing this idea, I've only focused on Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders. Right now you can navigate to the Issues we Found page. This was built by using some basic web scraping to collect a list of issues that each of these candidates lists on their website. At the bottom of that page, you'll find a table of issues where we think there is overlap between the two candidates based on fuzzy string matching on just the names of the issues. Each row of that table links to a page where we compare what each candidate has to say about that issue. This isn't always pretty. Right now we just show you bullet point text extracted on each candidate's issue page.