Issue Positions:
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Issue positions (referred to as an IP by the pros) are a form of public statement that expresses politicians’ viewpoints. These can range from topics like health care to the 2nd Amendment to term limits to something state-specific. Issue positions are collected for all of Presidential, Congressional, Gubernatorial, and State Legislatures – for both current officials and candidates. The policy for State Wide and State Judicial is if you find their positions, you take them, but don’t go out of your way to find them – IP’s for SJ and SW happen very rarely. Issue positions are usually taken by the Profiles sub-department.
What constitutes as an issue position
Most candidates have a place on their website that says “Positions” or “Stances” – this is where you would go to look for issue positions. But be aware, sometimes the websites are poorly set-up and the issue position would just be on a random page on the candidate’s website.
How to take an issue position
Go to the Public Statements tab, and then, check to see if the issue position has already been taken by somebody else. As you should already know, we dislike having duplicated data. There are a few ways to check: you can scroll back to 01/01/[current year] (if the issue position is from a .gov, scroll back to even two years prior) or, you can CTRL+F Issue Position which will find you all the times Issue Position has been used. If the issue position has already been taken (you’ll know because it’ll be the exact same), your work is done and you can move on to the next one.
To enter new issue positions into Admin
In the Public Statements tab, click the Add New button. Fill out the fields.
Date: In most cases, this is always going to be the first of the year: 01/01/[current year], because most politicians and candidates don’t put dates on their issue positions. The only reasons why you would not put the date as 01/01/[current year] are that the politician/candidate put a date on their website OR, it was previously collected by somebody and a few words have changed. Thus, it is a changed issue position, and must be taken, however giving it the same date would confuse not only us but also the voters: the real people we’re trying to help. In this second case, you would give it the date you collected it. A good example of a candidate who has issue positions like this is Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential candidacy.
Location: In most cases, this is always going to be Unknown. The only reason why it would not be Unknown is because sometimes the candidates/officials put the location on the issue position. This rarely happens. Always make sure you capitalize the U in Unknown.
Speech Type: This is a dropdown of the different public statements we collect. Make sure to always select Issue Position.
Title: Titles always start with “Issue Position:” and then you continue with whatever the candidate/official has as their title. (Ie: Issue Position: Health Care) Sometimes the candidate/official has their title all in capital letters (HEALTH CARE) you must put this into proper format (Health Care). Sometimes a candidate/official does not give a title to their position. In this case, something like “Issue Position: Issues” or “Issue Position: My Values” is okay for the title.
Speech Text: This should be taken exactly as is – exactly as the candidate/official has it. If there are spelling errors, keep them in – if we change their spelling, it could be considered partisan.
Remember to cat and tag the issue position appropriately and then click Save. Now it is time to move onto the next one!
Issue positions are sometimes hard to grasp for incoming people. Remember, if you have any questions on them: always ask either the head of the bios sub-department or the research director.
A Few Notes
- Use asterisks where bullet points were in the original text.
- The only thing that we fix is paragraph and line spacing issues. Make sure that there is only one line between paragraphs.
- Vote Smart website may not recognize certain symbols included in the issue positions from other websites. These errors may show up in the text of the issue position, once you have saved it. It may be a good idea to check a few of these issue positions per candidate on the website, to make sure that all symbols are recognized.
