Kieskompas - Election Compass, after having developed a successful Voting Advice Application (VAA) for the US Democratic Primaries, has now published a more popularized version for the US Presidential Election: the Trump meter. As always, Kieskompas sticks to its scientific roots. This VAA has been developed through a fully scientific method, and by a team of experts in the Netherlands, the US, and each country in which the Trump Meter is published.
The selection and wording of the statements is executed in collaboration with American political scientists and, of course, the Kieskompas team, based on the American presidential campaign, the most salient debates in the US at the moment, and a large-scale panel survey among Americans. The scientific method also implies that the candidates are placed on all statements by experts who use a strict hierarchy of sources for this purpose. All positions are thus substantiated with communication from the candidates, their platform or website, social media channels, interviews or reliable media. These substantiations can be found transparently in the Trump Meter on the results page under the tab 'What do the candidates think?' It is on the basis of the positions of the candidates on the selected propositions that the Trump Meter calculates the results of users.
AD has published the first findings of their Trump meter, as well as HLN once about the agreement of the Flemish with Trump and once that 14% of Flemish people would vote for Trump. Dutch people agree on average for 30% with Trump (compared to 31% agreement among Flemish residents), and for 66% with Biden (64% in Flanders). We also found that voters of right wing parties, perhaps unsurprisingly, on average agreed more with Trump than voters for more centrist or left-wing parties. Young people, on average, have higher agreement with Trump and would vote for Trump more than older people. AD published more recent findings, in which it converts the percentage agreement into voting choice. Approximately 65 percent of the Dutch people would vote for Biden. Only 20 percent would vote for Trump.
In Bulgaria, we see very different results. Bulgarian news website Blitz published results of the Bulgarian Trump meter. Nearly 60 percent of Bulgarians would pick Trump as president of the United States. Only 22 percent would choose Biden. Results of the Danish Trump meter are also published. The Danish newspaper B.T. Nyheder recently published the results of their Trump meter. In Denmark, there is a much stronger agreement with Biden than with Trump. The Danish news articles show very detailed information. When looking at the Danish results, the difference between age groups is notable: 18-34 year olds have an average of 30 percent agreement with Trump. That is a lot less for people over 65 years: 24.5 percent.
The Trump Meter is live in eight different countries! The Jetzt, the German online youth magazine of Süddeutsche Zeitung, interviewed us about the Trump-O-Mat. Many news articles about the Trump Meter have been published. The attention for the Trump Meter was massive and widespread. If you want to read more about the Trump Meter and the news articles posted about it, you can visit our news page.
