I conducted two surveys among hundreds of diverse people from various parts of the United States in 2016 before that election.
Both surveys included platforms on issues taken from four front-running candidates: Trump, Clinton, Johnson, and Stein.
The platforms were in their own words from their own websites. War, healthcare, immigration, environment, taxes, etc.
Each question of the survey listed each of the four candidate's platform and asked participants to select the platform they most agreed with (e.g. the "healthcare" question listed each candidate's stance on healthcare), then at the end of the survey asked the participants to indicate which candidate they intended to vote for.
The two surveys were identical except one feature: in one survey, each platform listed the candidate name so participants knew whose platforms they were selecting; in the other survey, each platform was anonymized so participants did NOT know whose platforms they were selecting.
The result was fascinating:
when people saw the names of the candidates on each platform, they almost always selected the platforms of the candidates they intended to vote for;
when platforms were ANONYMOUS, ALMOST EVERYBODY selected Jill Stein's and Gary Johnson's platforms, despite saying at the end of the survey that they intended to vote for Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton.
Jill Stein's platforms WERE the MOST popular by a HUGE margin. Gary Johnson's platforms were next most popular.
Hillary's and Donald's platforms had very little popularity when their names were not included.
Jill Stein's PLATFORMS ARE DEMONSTRABLY more popular than Donald Trump's or the democrats's.
That same year I found a source that monitors media reporting of political candidates by name.
In the year leading up to the election, Donald Trump's name was mentioned by media over 100 times more than Hillary's name, and more than 1000 times more than the next leading candidPost too long. Click here to view the full text.
