Think you can tell a Democrat from a Republican?
January 17, 2016 7:58 PM   Subscribe

Think you can tell a Democrat from a Republican?
You are presented with a bill from 2005-2014, and have to decide if that bill was sponsored by a Democrat or a Republican. Some are obvious, some are tricky, and some are really surprising!

I recently got very curious about how different our two major US parties really are, during non-election-years and on issues not covered by mainstream media. I made this website to see for myself, and for others to test their own intuition.

So far, on 500+ responses, people can only correctly identify the party behind ~60% of recent bills. I'm trying to get many more participants to see if any patterns emerge, and to spur some new kinds of discussion before we all go out and vote.
Role: Concept, coding,
posted by hammurderer (7 comments total) 3 users marked this as a favorite
This project was posted to MetaFilter by aniola on January 25, 2016: Think you can tell a Democrat from a Republican?

I guess I should also clarify what I'm after:
If you thought the site was worthy of spending a minute or two, please share it with others (for example: FB, Twitter, MeFi front page, Reddit, or however you think you'd like to share it). The more people participate, the more interesting it can become.
posted by hammurderer at 1:09 PM on January 18, 2016


This is super hard! Fun, but hard - separating the face-value from possible agendas.
posted by janell at 7:40 PM on January 18, 2016


I like this a lot, but think the shorter ones really detract from the whole thing and make it unnecessarily harder in a way that feels forced. Other than that awesome!!
posted by corb at 9:52 PM on January 20, 2016


What do you mean by "shorter ones"? If it's the "temporary suspension of duty", I agree that those are pretty weird. They make up roughly 10% of all bills, though. So clearly they are very important to our government (or other interests...)

In other news, I'm proud to announce that I have just become a US citizen! So this year I can finally have my say about which duties we temporarily suspend!
posted by hammurderer at 10:02 PM on January 21, 2016 [2 favorites]


I had no idea that was 10% of all bills! The things you learn! But congratulations on the citizenship!!
posted by corb at 5:41 AM on January 22, 2016


Sorry, closer to 5%. It just seems like they always come up.
posted by hammurderer at 9:16 PM on January 22, 2016


Up to 12,000 responses. You can see some stats here: http://congresschallenge.org/Quiz/stats
posted by hammurderer at 3:23 PM on January 24, 2016


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