Our method, in plain English

The quiz

You rate 21 statements from strongly disagree to strongly agree. They feed three scales: how you see the economy (shared responsibility or self-reliance), how you see society (change or tradition), and how much you trust the political system.

• On each scale, some statements lean left and some lean right, so agreeing with everything puts you in the middle instead of on one side.
• If you choose “I'm not sure what this means”, that statement is left out. It doesn't count as a neutral answer.
• Your two main scores place you in one of nine types. The cut-offs are fixed and the same for everyone. We will calibrate them against national survey data and publish any change.

We don't match you to candidates yet. When we add matching for primaries and local races, the rules will be published, every match will show the votes and statements behind it, and candidates will be able to dispute how we describe their positions.

The panel

Panel members get a few short questions a week about what's in the news. Because we ask the same people again and again, we can measure change much more precisely than a one-off poll, and we can ask people who change their minds what changed them.

• People who sign up for a political panel are more interested in politics than average. We correct for that by weighting results to match the country on age, gender, education, race and ethnicity, region and past vote.
• We record how each member voted soon after every election. That is the anchor for weighting, and it's more reliable than asking people years later.
• Weighting fixes a lot but not everything. We will publish how our numbers compare with election results, including when we get it wrong.

How we use AI

AI helps us draft question wording from what members tell us, and sort thousands of written answers into themes. A person edits every question before it goes out and checks the themes against the answers themselves. AI never interviews you, never decides your type, and never tells you who to vote for.

Staying neutral

• We are not connected to any party or campaign, and nobody can pay to change a question.
• Organizations can buy combined results and custom research. We publish our client rules, and we never sell or share anyone's individual answers.
• Every published result comes with how it was made: the question, the sample size and the margin of error.

Questions about any of this? Read the privacy notice or take the quiz and see for yourself.