Minnesota Public Radio recently put an interesting poll out on their web site. You select options for each question that most aptly represent your political view, and then it ranks all the current presidential candidates in order of those that are most closely aligned with your views.

I wasn't surprised to see that it matched me up most closely with Carol Moseley Braun, matching my answers with hers at a ratio of 63.0%. I've liked a number of her positions for some time now; I just wasn't sure that she has a broad enough general appeal right now to be an electable candidate.

I also wasn't surprised that Howard Dean and Dennis Kucinich followed close behind at 54.0%. I've liked them both for some time.

I was a little more surprised that John Kerry and John Edwards also matched up at a ratio of 54.0%, but not terribly so. I have always liked at least some stances that each has taken.

No surprise at all that George Bush and I had a 0.0% match-up on our political viewpoints.

It's not a perfect survey. It doesn't account for situations where no one candidate's stance matches up with your stance on an issue -- stances outside of those taken by candidates are not represented. There was no stance that I agreed with for education or for health insurance programs, for instance -- for each I had to choose the option I was least unhappy with, rather than tje one that I agreed with. It's not that I don't have opinions, it's that the allotted answers did not adequately represent any stances that matched mine.

It's still an interesting survey, however.

If you're not much of a survey person and would rather just see the stances that the candidates have taken on each item, you can check out a breakdown of all the candidates' positions.

There's also a page of cumulative results for everyone that has taken the survey. Of all those people, most have matched up best with Kucinich (63%) with Howard Dean coming in at a distant second (32%). I wonder, actually, why Kucinich hasn't gotten more press and been more universally popular throughout this nomination process.