Back in December 2007, Matt Waterman, who set up one of the blind taste test web pages for the primaries told me:
Five months after launch we’ve had over 200,000 people use the tool to find out how well candidates’ views match up against their own. Records from the submissions have shown the most common top match-up to be, by a wide margin, Dennis Kucinich, with Ron Paul, Mitt Romney, and Mike Gravel as the distant runners-up. The data that have been collected are far from scientific, but do seem to demonstrate a large disconnect between where people stand on the issues and who conventional polls have indicated they plan to vote for. I would be interested to see the results if pollsters asked questions like these [‘blind taste tests’]. People may not know where the candidates actually stand on many of these issues, or perhaps they’re making their decisions based on only a few key political issues. It’s also likely that people simply don’t see some candidates as being electable.
This severely undermines the argument, put forward by many detractors, that third party runs are somehow dubious because “we heard from Kucinich and Ron Paul in the primaries.”
Also, thanks to Philip Meyer, Knight chair in journalism at the University of North Carolina for pointing me in good direction about the “spiral of silence.”