If you want to know how the Candidate cards were derived, keep reading!

POLICY GRADIENTS

First of all, the goal was to be neutral. Of course we have biases like everyone else, but the goal was to use as neutral of phrasing on the policy gradients as we could come up with. It still won’t be perfect, but we did our best and welcome feedback to continue improving.

To determine where candidates fell on each gradient, we sent them a 16-question, multiple-choice questionnaire. (Note that there were multiple answer choices given — these were generally not Yes/No. Also, brief free-text was allowed if they felt they really needed it, but multiple-choice allows for a far more objective and even playing field.) Then we applied a set rubric to their answers to obtain objective results.

Some of the questions were about policies that have already been set by previous councils, and some about policies that may yet come up. Some were about specifics and some about larger concepts. Some questions may seem trivial, while you may feel there were obvious questions that weren't asked. All of that is okay because the questions were designed to, altogether, determine where a candidate lands on four high-level gradients — not to deeply assess any one particular policy decision and definitely not to make any sort of endorsement or judgment. As the kids might say, it was to measure their vibe.

These were the questions we asked:

1. Should we have and enforce a camping ban?
2. Do we need more temporary shelters?
3. Should public drug use be a crime?
4. With a finite budget, would you focus more on expanding police, or expanding Portland Street Response?
5. Should we upzone the Inner Eastside?
6. Do you support Portland's current inclusionary zoning policy?
7. Today in housing, what's more important: Quality of design or Quicker development?
8. Should we waive developer fees to get more housing?
9. Should new buildings be required to build off-street parking?
10. Should we convert more driving lanes to bike lanes?
11. Should we expand the I-5 highway through the Rose Quarter?
12. Should we invest more or less in the Biketown program?
13. What is your approach to our current local tax environment?
14. How should the city address the Keller auditorium situation?
15. PBOT says it has a funding crisis. What would you do?
16. What is the balance between public participation and timely action?

Here are how their answers shook out in the aggregate:

When a candidate answers a questionnaire for an endorsement, they often know what the “right” answers are if they know anything about the endorsing organization. In this case, there were no “right” answers.

But not all candidates answered the questionnaire. Candidates who didn’t answer the questionnaire were still given a card if they register at least 100 contributions on the Small Donor Program portal. If not, then no card. The policy gradient values for those candidates were determined, as best as we could, from their websites. Where the website was unclear, lacked specifics, or was even completely silent, we put simply “indeterminate”. Each voter may choose to react to that information differently, and we think that’s fair.

You can tell on each card whether the policy gradient values come from our questionnaire or from attempting to decipher their website:

  • Questionnaire = WHITE values in the policy gradients

  • Website = BLACK values in the policy gradients

In the game, policy gradients form the foundation of everything that will happen.

EXPERIENCE (0-4)

City Council will be Portland's legislative arm, so council candidates were assessed on "Governing Experience". We looked at policy expertise, community involvement (particularly with neighborhood associations), municipal committee participation, work experience (particularly with municipalities), and previous experience in elected office.

The Mayor will manage Portland's executive arm, so mayoral candidates were assessed on "Executive Experience". We looked at leadership responsibilities over teams, departments, organizations, and companies.

In the game, experience values very rarely come into play.

CONTRIBUTION COUNT

We looked at https://openelectionsportland.org/ which tracks contributions for candidates that participate in the small donor program. We used the value for all contributions (count, not $) through September 15th. There can be a bit of a lag in the data and that lag can affect candidates unevenly, so the idea is that this date is recent enough to capture the vast bulk of contribution activity, while still looking far enough back that we don't have to worry as much about the data lag.

In the game, contribution count will primarily just serve as a tie-breaker in the Election phase.

BUT IN THE END…

It's not perfect. Perfect isn't possible. But we think we've succeeded in providing voters with a solidly objective and unjudgmental jumping point into this wild Portland election. We encourage research beyond the cards to really hone your ranked decisions, but we hope the cards help you focus your energy on the candidates most aligned to you. We also hope people of different persuasions look at the same cards and think different things, because we're not trying to promote candidates or persuade voters. The goal here is just education — and, in the case of the game side of it, fun!