Holiday Movie Night with the Nieces with a little politics

[Sherman A1]

Friday night my two teenage nieces & Mother in Law were over for their annual sleep over & movie/game night with my daughter while she is in town. I took the opportunity to do a couple of the "find your candidate" web sites with them. None of them are overly political and the youngest niece is 16 so too young to vote. We just went down the questions, their choices were their choices and I made no attempt to influence them. I would answer questions as best I could on the particular issue, but they did the surveys and it was their decisions.

The results were all over the place with the oldest niece getting HRC in the first survey and DK in the second. The youngest only did one and ended up with Mitt on top but Edwards in her #3 spot. Mother in Law came up with HRC in one and Huck in another. We had a good time doing it and my only comment at the end was when printing out their results was to go look at their top few candidates, see what they have to say and make your choice. They might not vote for my choice in the primaries, but might do some looking and be better informed. Anyway we had fun doing it.

[Anouka]

1. Do you have links to those sites?

I think it might be interesting to see how those sites determined what candidate was best for which prospective voter.

What do you yourself see it as meaning, that Hillary, Edwards, Dennis, Romney and Huckabee were your family's choices? or that your family's choices changed so drastically (or was it drastically?) when doing the votes a second time.

Were your family members dissatisfied with their first choices? Were they honest both times?

[Sherman A1]

2. I will have to look up the sites for you.

The questions were a bit different on each and I had done both myself earlier and come up with DK for me both times and done one for my daughter who while telling me she supports HRC came up with DK (which drove her nuts as I sipped my coffee from my DK mug).

As to what they felt or didn't I don't know. My objective was to get them to think about the issues and who might reflect them best for them. I didn't want to push my views on them. If someone, anyone is a strong social/fiscal conservative, has looked at the issues and the candidates, thinks about how things are and might be and maintains those views that is fine with me. My concerns are the ones that just take the Fox News snippets and assume they are truth.

To get to the sites I just googled "find your candidate"

The first site was from www.wqad.com

The second was the VAJoe one (which I know has a conservative bent, but had more questions). It was also the one where I got to explain waterboarding to my 19 year old niece as it was one of the questions.

The sites may have been okay or perhaps not the best, but if I can get them thinking about the issues I feel like I made some progress.