Categorizing Candidates

[The Rebel Poet]

I need help with a project I'll be sharing soon; how would you categorize these Presidential candidates?



Michelle Bachmann

George W. Bush

Herman Cain

Elizabeth Dole

Steve Forbes

Newt Gingrich

Rudy Giuliani

Mike Huckabee

John McCain

Ron Paul

Rick Perry

Dan Quayle

Mitt Romney

Fred Thompson


I need the shortest amount of categories that is useful. They should obviously be categorized by their political stances, but the point is to group them to where their voter support is theoretically fungible. For instance, most of the people who voted for Ron Paul could probably vote for Rand Paul without a much hesitation. Some people who would vote for Ron would never vote for Rand, and vice versa, but their support overlaps enough that you make up the losses one way or the other.


I know one group will be "Liberty Candidates" (Paul etc.), but what of the others? How should they be grouped, and what are the names of the groups? I think at least three would be good, because I just don't think that an us vs. them binary system is going to capture the full dynamic of it (I'm thinking about the fight between Romney-Paul-Santorum in 2012), and I think more than four would be too many to be useful - it's not really that complicated. I definitely want between 2 and 5.


If you're wondering why I chose the people I did, it's because those are the people for whom there were contracts in the Iowa Electronic Markets in the 2000, 2008 and 2012 Republican Primaries - I just needed some functional list, and that was quick and works.

[Cabal]

I need help with a project I'll be sharing soon; how would you categorize these Presidential candidates?



Michelle Bachmann

George W. Bush

Herman Cain

Elizabeth Dole

Steve Forbes

Newt Gingrich

Rudy Giuliani

Mike Huckabee

John McCain

Rick Perry

Dan Quayle

Mitt Romney

Fred Thompson


Statists.

[The Rebel Poet]

Statists.

That's true in degrees, but in diagramming elections, it is useful to understand the differences between different statists and their voting blocks. Lumping together everyone who believes in a bigger state one way or another is accurate, but not very useful in determining voting patterns. When some want to expand Government here, and others want to expand there, some want to expand it a lot, and some want to expand it a little or even shrink it (not enough), I would assume they end up with different voters.

As an analogy, one could lump Democrats and Republicans together as the two party monopoly: that is totally accurate from a what-do-they-accomplish point of view, but it doesn't help explain voter patterns as Red Team and Blue Team voters are not interchangeable - they believe there are differences and most don't swing vote.

[muzzled dogg]

Statists.
This