Having created our scorecard for presidential candidates, we should think about how to fill it in. The information we want is not all available, so we will need to make some educated guesses.

Almost half the time there is one candidate with a track record as president, although it is a long time since we have had two (the last time being when Theodore Roosevelt in 1912, and even then he ran as a “third party” candidate; Grover Cleveland’s run in 1892 is the only previous example of what seems to be happening this year, with a defeated president coming back to capture his party’s nomination).

Every sitting president has made many campaign promises, and performance on these can be checked, although some interpretation is necessary. Politifact (an independent fact-checking organization) has detailed analysis of performance on presidential campaign promises of Trump and Biden. At the time of writing, Biden, with a little over 3 years in office, has 27/6/2/30/33 percent in the categories Kept/Compromise/Broken/Stalled/In the Works while Trump over 4 years accumulated 23/22/53/0/0. So this gives us some idea of their overall effectiveness, and will help illuminate some categories on the scorecard, such as Administrative Skills and Relations with Congress, and may also be relevant to the truthfulness of the presidents.

Propensity for truth-telling is directly relevant to some of the scorecard categories (such as Moral Authority) and may be relevant to some others, such as Public Persuasion. Politifact also looks at the truthfulness of statements by the candidates themselves, with  Trump and Biden having the most data, as expected. There is a clear difference here: all politicians (all humans?) try to take credit for too much and to minimize their faults, and Biden is no exception. but there has never been a major presidential candidate with the sheer volume of  lies that Trump has displayed.

Policy statements are relevant to some categories, such as Vision/Setting an Agenda,  International Relations, Economic Management and Pursued Equal Justice for All. The candidates’ websites (Trump and Biden) are largely uninformative and essentially just portals for fundraising. Each represents a major political party that has (usually) a policy platform, usually updated closer to the election (the current platforms online seem to be holdovers from 2020 –  Democratic and 2016 – Republican). Notably,  the Republicans did not offer a policy platform in 2020. Less detailed and less up-to-date general policy information is on Wikipedia: Democratic and Republican.

Many focused political advocacy groups  and newspapers produce policy comparisons of major candidates closer to the election. These vary in quality and are hard to find systematically, and are often used for Congressional, state and local elections too. A more systematic coverage of these by mainstream media would be very helpful, and something I would like to see in future.

The presidential campaign is long and arduous, and thus serves as a test of stamina, organization and personality. However it does not directly test the ability of candidates to do the job they are auditioning for. It would be worth trying giving candidates exercises (some of which could be take-home) using hypothetical situations, to see how they react. This may be more useful than televised real-time debates, which create heat but not much light.

The good thing about the scorecards is that there are 10 categories, and a small number of serious candidates (usually only two) , so that approximate values for each category are still likely to lead to a clear preference for one candidate. How strong the preference for the higher-scoring candidate has to be in order to motivate a voter to cast a vote is another story, which I will discuss in a later post.