The Compass is the radio show. Navigating the public square together with faith, truth and conviction
Rick Beggs Welcome to the Compass. Navigating the public square together with faith, truth and conviction. Well, good afternoon. We're so glad you're with us on the Compass. The Compass is the radio show. The official radio show, I might add to iVoterGuide and ivoterguide.com that little voice you just heard is Debbie. What now? She is my co host and she is the president of iVoterGuide voter guide. And today, yeah, is a special day. I know. you know, I'm controlling the mic so I get to say it. It's Debbie's birthday. Let's all sing. No, no. if you're in your car or at your home, I would like you to sing. I'm not gonna sing.
Debbie Wuthnow Are you gonna. I'm not singing to myself.
Rick Beggs I know, but did you. You know what? I have a next, week is my.
Debbie Wuthnow I know. Next week. I'll sing to you.
Rick Beggs Next week you're gonna sing.
Debbie Wuthnow I will. Seriously, next week.
Rick Beggs I love it. I will hold you to it. I will tape it. I will have Willie B tape it back in Tupelo and he could put
Debbie Wuthnow some music in, some background. Background singers.
Rick Beggs I don't know if you remember, but Happy birthday is music. And if it's not coming out of your mouth as music, then I'm going to need to replace the vocals.
Debbie Wuthnow We need backup vocals.
Rick Beggs We're so glad you joined our show.
Debbie remembers having a birthday in the summer when there was no school
Just so we could talk about Debbie. You know what was hard about having a birthday in the summer?
Debbie Wuthnow no. There's no party at school. Everybody gets a party at school. Mom brings cupcakes, and there's no school, so I didn't get that. I didn't get cupcakes. Did you?
Rick Beggs Well, I was pretty popular. I. I don't want to brag.
Debbie Wuthnow Rub it in.
Rick Beggs No, I mean, you're right. There was nothing special that you could enjoy at school or your friends coming up and doing, you know, your girlfriends
Debbie Wuthnow making things for you. Mom says, what do you want for dinner? And that was. That was it.
Rick Beggs Yeah. That's what we got. That's right. Sometimes I got a butterfly cake, but
Debbie Wuthnow this time I got Rick on the radio.
Rick Beggs I know. Happy birthday to you.
Debbie Wuthnow Thank you, Rick.
Rick Beggs I'm glad to do this with you.
We talk about I voter guide questionnaire and how voters should use it
I. I want to kind of jump off from where we ended last show, which was jumping up from the show that we did the week before because we've been talking about the questionnaire that we have on iVoterGuide voter guide. And when you go into ivoterguide.com, put your name in there.
Debbie Wuthnow If you've never done that your address, not your name.
Rick Beggs That's correct. That is correct. Is your address. I stand corrected. And so when you do that, your ballot comes up and you get to see all your candidates, Right?
Debbie Wuthnow Well, at the time for your election.
Rick Beggs But yeah, and at the very, one of the areas that we look at as a questionnaire, that's why we're kind of going over this is to why is that important? We've sort of answered that on the last two shows and then maybe even how candidates view it. But we thought we would talk about, today is what are we looking for when we're making these decisions about whether somebody is conservative or liberal or moderate, whatever the case may be. And so what are we looking for in the questions? And then how are we using it?
Debbie Wuthnow Oh, you're right. How do we use it? But also I think how voters should use it. Just give them some little tips.
Rick Beggs Okay.
Debbie Wuthnow Of how to interpret it.
Candidates will complain our questionnaires are too long
Rick Beggs So that's where I want to jump off on. So how do you want, how do you want to answer those questions?
Debbie Wuthnow I think let's start by the types of questions we ask. Okay, so, most of our questions. So candidates will complain our questionnaires too long. I had a friend who ran for, an office in Texas, and he's like, oh, my gosh, I spent hours on your questionnaire. But we try to cover as many topics as we can because voters want to know. So it's about 30, 35 questions on average, sometimes a little less. But we try to make it, as efficient as possible. So most of the questions are what I would call a. It's a statement. It will read as a statement. And then the candidate can say anywhere from strongly agree, agree, some, I don't, indifferent, I don't care, I don't know, and answer it that way.
Rick Beggs But then you do have questions where they can actually write in some answers.
Debbie Wuthnow Right. Open text question. So it's just a question and they get a box. But interestingly, we've learned that by adding a little, box below even those statement questions. So they can select their strongly agree to strongly disagree. And then we just give a please explain and give them a box. And sometimes what they give is pretty illuminating in, how they qualify.
Rick Beggs So they answered a question, but they spoke it their answer differently than their.
Debbie Wuthnow And sometimes they're trying to justify or rationalize why they said what they said. Sometimes they'll give an exception to what they said. Like most of the time, I mean that, but in this case, I mean something different. So, One of the ways we look at that is for consistency. Are they being consistent in their responses, and really just reading through what they've said. Because it can be more illuminating with. Once the candidate just starts to speak as it is, you know, in writing and answering those questions, do you
Rick Beggs find that most, of the candidates will write in or are they just looking to say yes or no? Sort of like talking to your teenager?
Debbie Wuthnow We see both. I would see there's candidates who are like, I don't have time for this. And they probably the incumbents more so that just, you know, get it done as quickly as they can, say, strongly agree, move on, move on, move on. I think more so the challengers who know where they're trying to communicate and they, you know, maybe sometimes they over communicate, but it's great. Voters want to hear what you have to say, so that gives them that opportunity to say more there.
Rick Beggs so we look at the consistency and how they answer and especially if they actually spell it out in a written form, what else are we looking for?
Debbie Wuthnow Well, when it's an open text question, right. It is a specific question. So we look for did they really answer the question or did they kind of talk around it? You know, politicians are kind of famous for the pivot to what they want to say. So are they really addressing our question? Are they saying something about another topic and trying to evade answering the actual question that we ask them?
Rick Beggs Well, and I've noticed on some of my candidates, in the state of Georgia, where you will have, they will have five choices, A through E, I guess, and you'll go, is it this? Is it that? Is it this? And they're supposed to pick one. And some will say, well, it's between B and C. But I think what they're trying to do is they're trying not to wipe out part of the population that might disagree with them on C because they're a B follower. But it's interesting how they game it or try to game it.
Debbie Wuthnow And how do you look at that? Do you. I mean, you have to kind of say, well, you know, I'm kind of. Could be either. I, maybe I see both sides. Depends on the audience or whatever it is. That's. I think our healthcare question, right, Gives, gives those types of options. So, that's why we'd like to hear what the candidate has to say. Explain it.
Rick Beggs Yeah. So, outside of that, what's. What's another thing that we are looking.
Debbie Wuthnow Well, I sense consistency in Just with, with the statement response and what they put in the text box. But we're also looking for consistency with all the other data points we've gathered. Right. They say they're strongly pro life, but yet they got a donation from Planned Parenthood. So we kind of try to compare that up to your scorecards. If they've got them.
Rick Beggs Right.
Debbie Wuthnow campaign finance, if they. A lot of them will have that. So just consistency across the board, you know, for that. Again, we're looking for the evidence and the questionnaire is what they say, but what they do has more weight. So just kind of look at the whole package. Right. It's same as Bible study. Look at all of it. Context.
Rick Beggs Yeah.
Debbie Wuthnow The whole.
Rick Beggs Yeah. In some respects, we're like CSI of voting, and we're trying to put all the pieces together so that when the voter goes to look up their ballot, they have everything available to them so they can vote wisely. Which is really the theme of why we have aggregated all this information.
Debbie Wuthnow We say that on the website.
Rick Beggs We do, we do. It's our subset of I vote, grounded
Debbie Wuthnow in God, rooted in research. So that you can vote wisely.
Rick Beggs Yeah. Okay, so we have those two things that we're doing.
Panelists use questionnaire to help voters pick between candidates in primaries
What else are we doing when we're looking at all this?
Debbie Wuthnow Well, we're getting ready to vote. Right. So I will say that, especially in a primary election, when you're trying to choose between candidates in your party, that's where I really try to dive deeper. frequently I've had candidates, you know, multiple candidates get the same rating, you know, ideally verified conservative, but even then you still have to pick. So where are you going to figure out which candidate that you're. That I'm going to vote for, you're going to vote for. So reading the details of the answers on the candidate, and really read the whole thing, especially I. We will say it takes the candidate a lot of time to do this. And I know they get questionnaires from dozens of groups. Any group that wants, you know, an endorsement, they're. They're constantly answering questionnaires. So we want to give, give them that return in reading what they've said, really thinking about it, looking for consistency. And, I will say that when a candidate takes the time to answer our questionnaire, we do our best to assign a rating to them. I don't think we've ever had a candidate answer the questionnaire that got insufficient information. So there are candidates that we do rate that way because they don't answer the questionnaire.
Rick Beggs Right.
Debbie Wuthnow They don't have scorecards. They've maybe given a donation to the. From the Republican Party. It's not really enough to sign a rating, but if the candidate takes the time to answer the questionnaire, we will place them on our gas gauge somewhere.
Rick Beggs Yeah, and I, And I've said this before on our broadcast, but I really use it as my tiebreaker, especially in the primaries. First of all, if they answered the questionnaire, you already get a little check on my list. And then if they both have, then I get to walk through all of.
Debbie Wuthnow And I even, like, now we have this, comparison feature. If they've both answered the questionnaire. If you, go back to the race page, where it lists all the candidates that are in a race, and you can check the box under the two candidates that maybe answer the questionnaire that you want to compare, you're trying to decide between, and then go to the comparison page and click the, the questionnaire. You can literally see their answers side by side.
Rick Beggs Oh, okay.
Debbie Wuthnow So it makes it really easy to see which one's, you know, more evasive or answer the question or, you know, aligns with you more.
Rick Beggs So it's like shopping for a hotel in one city, and you got them all right next to each other.
Debbie Wuthnow And the website is that like. I mean, it's got the little box kind of like when you're looking for a computer at Best Buy, and you check the boxes and then you click the compare. So, our team did a great job with that.
Rick Beggs So have we covered. How do we use this when we get all this information? How are the panel. How is everybody going through this? I mean, do you have find yourself where you got all this information about one candidate and now you got to apply a rating to them?
Debbie Wuthnow but it is just one part of it. So, if you've never been a panelist, and, we've talked before about how we really do need panelists.
Rick Beggs Sign up. We need panelists. We're always looking for panelists.
Debbie Wuthnow Need panelists. So the panelists are the first people who read everything, right? They're reading every candidate answer. They're checking out their website and their social media. But on. And it all happens on our, Our back end on that database website. So to facilitate them in putting together the pieces as they're reading an answer to a questionnaire, they actually can assign a score for each question and kind of give it a. A percentile. And we have for them guidance of what we're looking for. You know, what are, if they, you know, if they answer this, we're, you know, at least give them 80% so they can. And we give them guidance in what to look for on each question. And then we put all those pieces together and they give an overall score to the questionnaire, and then they can give a score to their website and their social media individually. And then we ask them to look at it all as a picture and, and average that of, you know, where do you see conservative positions or what we call data points? Or where do you see liberal positions or data points? And our criteria of where you land on the gas gauge is based upon those liberal and conservative data points. And it could be, you know, a couple of answers on the questionnaire could
Rick Beggs be that kind of throw you one way.
Debbie Wuthnow Yeah.
Rick Beggs now, we have gone over the questionnaire thoroughly. I don't know if we've done it correctly.
Debbie Wuthnow Well, we've done from a high level.
Rick Beggs Yes, we have. I wish what we would have done is told every time we got on the broadcast is to say, okay, pull up your last ballot.
Debbie Wuthnow Say it now.
Rick Beggs An
The Compass is the radio show. Navigating the public square together with faith, truth and conviction
Rick Beggs Welcome to the Compass. Navigating the public square together with faith, truth and conviction. Well, good afternoon. We're so glad you're with us on the Compass. The Compass is the radio show. The official radio show, I might add to iVoterGuide and ivoterguide.com that little voice you just heard is Debbie. What now? She is my co host and she is the president of iVoterGuide voter guide. And today, yeah, is a special day. I know. you know, I'm controlling the mic so I get to say it. It's Debbie's birthday. Let's all sing. No, no. if you're in your car or at your home, I would like you to sing. I'm not gonna sing.
Debbie Wuthnow Are you gonna. I'm not singing to myself.
Rick Beggs I know, but did you. You know what? I have a next, week is my.
Debbie Wuthnow I know. Next week. I'll sing to you.
Rick Beggs Next week you're gonna sing.
Debbie Wuthnow I will. Seriously, next week.
Rick Beggs I love it. I will hold you to it. I will tape it. I will have Willie B tape it back in Tupelo and he could put
Debbie Wuthnow some music in, some background. Background singers.
Rick Beggs I don't know if you remember, but Happy birthday is music. And if it's not coming out of your mouth as music, then I'm going to need to replace the vocals.
Debbie Wuthnow We need backup vocals.
Rick Beggs We're so glad you joined our show.
Debbie remembers having a birthday in the summer when there was no school
Just so we could talk about Debbie. You know what was hard about having a birthday in the summer?
Debbie Wuthnow no. There's no party at school. Everybody gets a party at school. Mom brings cupcakes, and there's no school, so I didn't get that. I didn't get cupcakes. Did you?
Rick Beggs Well, I was pretty popular. I. I don't want to brag.
Debbie Wuthnow Rub it in.
Rick Beggs No, I mean, you're right. There was nothing special that you could enjoy at school or your friends coming up and doing, you know, your girlfriends
Debbie Wuthnow making things for you. Mom says, what do you want for dinner? And that was. That was it.
Rick Beggs Yeah. That's what we got. That's right. Sometimes I got a butterfly cake, but
Debbie Wuthnow this time I got Rick on the radio.
Rick Beggs I know. Happy birthday to you.
Debbie Wuthnow Thank you, Rick.
Rick Beggs I'm glad to do this with you.
We talk about I voter guide questionnaire and how voters should use it
I. I want to kind of jump off from where we ended last show, which was jumping up from the show that we did the week before because we've been talking about the questionnaire that we have on iVoterGuide voter guide. And when you go into ivoterguide.com, put your name in there.
Debbie Wuthnow If you've never done that your address, not your name.
Rick Beggs That's correct. That is correct. Is your address. I stand corrected. And so when you do that, your ballot comes up and you get to see all your candidates, Right?
Debbie Wuthnow Well, at the time for your election.
Rick Beggs But yeah, and at the very, one of the areas that we look at as a questionnaire, that's why we're kind of going over this is to why is that important? We've sort of answered that on the last two shows and then maybe even how candidates view it. But we thought we would talk about, today is what are we looking for when we're making these decisions about whether somebody is conservative or liberal or moderate, whatever the case may be. And so what are we looking for in the questions? And then how are we using it?
Debbie Wuthnow Oh, you're right. How do we use it? But also I think how voters should use it. Just give them some little tips.
Rick Beggs Okay.
Debbie Wuthnow Of how to interpret it.
Candidates will complain our questionnaires are too long
Rick Beggs So that's where I want to jump off on. So how do you want, how do you want to answer those questions?
Debbie Wuthnow I think let's start by the types of questions we ask. Okay, so, most of our questions. So candidates will complain our questionnaires too long. I had a friend who ran for, an office in Texas, and he's like, oh, my gosh, I spent hours on your questionnaire. But we try to cover as many topics as we can because voters want to know. So it's about 30, 35 questions on average, sometimes a little less. But we try to make it, as efficient as possible. So most of the questions are what I would call a. It's a statement. It will read as a statement. And then the candidate can say anywhere from strongly agree, agree, some, I don't, indifferent, I don't care, I don't know, and answer it that way.
Rick Beggs But then you do have questions where they can actually write in some answers.
Debbie Wuthnow Right. Open text question. So it's just a question and they get a box. But interestingly, we've learned that by adding a little, box below even those statement questions. So they can select their strongly agree to strongly disagree. And then we just give a please explain and give them a box. And sometimes what they give is pretty illuminating in, how they qualify.
Rick Beggs So they answered a question, but they spoke it their answer differently than their.
Debbie Wuthnow And sometimes they're trying to justify or rationalize why they said what they said. Sometimes they'll give an exception to what they said. Like most of the time, I mean that, but in this case, I mean something different. So, One of the ways we look at that is for consistency. Are they being consistent in their responses, and really just reading through what they've said. Because it can be more illuminating with. Once the candidate just starts to speak as it is, you know, in writing and answering those questions, do you
Rick Beggs find that most, of the candidates will write in or are they just looking to say yes or no? Sort of like talking to your teenager?
Debbie Wuthnow We see both. I would see there's candidates who are like, I don't have time for this. And they probably the incumbents more so that just, you know, get it done as quickly as they can, say, strongly agree, move on, move on, move on. I think more so the challengers who know where they're trying to communicate and they, you know, maybe sometimes they over communicate, but it's great. Voters want to hear what you have to say, so that gives them that opportunity to say more there.
Rick Beggs so we look at the consistency and how they answer and especially if they actually spell it out in a written form, what else are we looking for?
Debbie Wuthnow Well, when it's an open text question, right. It is a specific question. So we look for did they really answer the question or did they kind of talk around it? You know, politicians are kind of famous for the pivot to what they want to say. So are they really addressing our question? Are they saying something about another topic and trying to evade answering the actual question that we ask them?
Rick Beggs Well, and I've noticed on some of my candidates, in the state of Georgia, where you will have, they will have five choices, A through E, I guess, and you'll go, is it this? Is it that? Is it this? And they're supposed to pick one. And some will say, well, it's between B and C. But I think what they're trying to do is they're trying not to wipe out part of the population that might disagree with them on C because they're a B follower. But it's interesting how they game it or try to game it.
Debbie Wuthnow And how do you look at that? Do you. I mean, you have to kind of say, well, you know, I'm kind of. Could be either. I, maybe I see both sides. Depends on the audience or whatever it is. That's. I think our healthcare question, right, Gives, gives those types of options. So, that's why we'd like to hear what the candidate has to say. Explain it.
Rick Beggs Yeah. So, outside of that, what's. What's another thing that we are looking.
Debbie Wuthnow Well, I sense consistency in Just with, with the statement response and what they put in the text box. But we're also looking for consistency with all the other data points we've gathered. Right. They say they're strongly pro life, but yet they got a donation from Planned Parenthood. So we kind of try to compare that up to your scorecards. If they've got them.
Rick Beggs Right.
Debbie Wuthnow campaign finance, if they. A lot of them will have that. So just consistency across the board, you know, for that. Again, we're looking for the evidence and the questionnaire is what they say, but what they do has more weight. So just kind of look at the whole package. Right. It's same as Bible study. Look at all of it. Context.
Rick Beggs Yeah.
Debbie Wuthnow The whole.
Rick Beggs Yeah. In some respects, we're like CSI of voting, and we're trying to put all the pieces together so that when the voter goes to look up their ballot, they have everything available to them so they can vote wisely. Which is really the theme of why we have aggregated all this information.
Debbie Wuthnow We say that on the website.
Rick Beggs We do, we do. It's our subset of I vote, grounded
Debbie Wuthnow in God, rooted in research. So that you can vote wisely.
Rick Beggs Yeah. Okay, so we have those two things that we're doing.
Panelists use questionnaire to help voters pick between candidates in primaries
What else are we doing when we're looking at all this?
Debbie Wuthnow Well, we're getting ready to vote. Right. So I will say that, especially in a primary election, when you're trying to choose between candidates in your party, that's where I really try to dive deeper. frequently I've had candidates, you know, multiple candidates get the same rating, you know, ideally verified conservative, but even then you still have to pick. So where are you going to figure out which candidate that you're. That I'm going to vote for, you're going to vote for. So reading the details of the answers on the candidate, and really read the whole thing, especially I. We will say it takes the candidate a lot of time to do this. And I know they get questionnaires from dozens of groups. Any group that wants, you know, an endorsement, they're. They're constantly answering questionnaires. So we want to give, give them that return in reading what they've said, really thinking about it, looking for consistency. And, I will say that when a candidate takes the time to answer our questionnaire, we do our best to assign a rating to them. I don't think we've ever had a candidate answer the questionnaire that got insufficient information. So there are candidates that we do rate that way because they don't answer the questionnaire.
Rick Beggs Right.
Debbie Wuthnow They don't have scorecards. They've maybe given a donation to the. From the Republican Party. It's not really enough to sign a rating, but if the candidate takes the time to answer the questionnaire, we will place them on our gas gauge somewhere.
Rick Beggs Yeah, and I, And I've said this before on our broadcast, but I really use it as my tiebreaker, especially in the primaries. First of all, if they answered the questionnaire, you already get a little check on my list. And then if they both have, then I get to walk through all of.
Debbie Wuthnow And I even, like, now we have this, comparison feature. If they've both answered the questionnaire. If you, go back to the race page, where it lists all the candidates that are in a race, and you can check the box under the two candidates that maybe answer the questionnaire that you want to compare, you're trying to decide between, and then go to the comparison page and click the, the questionnaire. You can literally see their answers side by side.
Rick Beggs Oh, okay.
Debbie Wuthnow So it makes it really easy to see which one's, you know, more evasive or answer the question or, you know, aligns with you more.
Rick Beggs So it's like shopping for a hotel in one city, and you got them all right next to each other.
Debbie Wuthnow And the website is that like. I mean, it's got the little box kind of like when you're looking for a computer at Best Buy, and you check the boxes and then you click the compare. So, our team did a great job with that.
Rick Beggs So have we covered. How do we use this when we get all this information? How are the panel. How is everybody going through this? I mean, do you have find yourself where you got all this information about one candidate and now you got to apply a rating to them?
Debbie Wuthnow but it is just one part of it. So, if you've never been a panelist, and, we've talked before about how we really do need panelists.
Rick Beggs Sign up. We need panelists. We're always looking for panelists.
Debbie Wuthnow Need panelists. So the panelists are the first people who read everything, right? They're reading every candidate answer. They're checking out their website and their social media. But on. And it all happens on our, Our back end on that database website. So to facilitate them in putting together the pieces as they're reading an answer to a questionnaire, they actually can assign a score for each question and kind of give it a. A percentile. And we have for them guidance of what we're looking for. You know, what are, if they, you know, if they answer this, we're, you know, at least give them 80% so they can. And we give them guidance in what to look for on each question. And then we put all those pieces together and they give an overall score to the questionnaire, and then they can give a score to their website and their social media individually. And then we ask them to look at it all as a picture and, and average that of, you know, where do you see conservative positions or what we call data points? Or where do you see liberal positions or data points? And our criteria of where you land on the gas gauge is based upon those liberal and conservative data points. And it could be, you know, a couple of answers on the questionnaire could
Rick Beggs be that kind of throw you one way.
Debbie Wuthnow Yeah.
Rick Beggs now, we have gone over the questionnaire thoroughly. I don't know if we've done it correctly.
Debbie Wuthnow Well, we've done from a high level.
Rick Beggs Yes, we have. I wish what we would have done is told every time we got on the broadcast is to say, okay, pull up your last ballot.
Debbie Wuthnow Say it now.
Rick Beggs An I voter guide, so that they could kind of walk through somebody, a candidate that they had in. In, on their ballot. So it allows them to kind of see what questions we're asking. And, and maybe we should talk a little bit about some of those, Debbie, because we did talk about what we used to ask. And then, four years come and go, two years, new things have become more important than they were two, four years ago. But there are some pretty stable questions that we have along the way.
There are several questions on abortion that are open to interpretation. Let's talk about some of those. Well, like, uh, there's a
Let's talk about some of those.
Debbie Wuthnow Well, like, there's a right to life question about.
Rick Beggs Seems like a good place to start.
Debbie Wuthnow There is, and it would be, do you want Planned Parenthood to be funded? So the actual wording is abortion providers, including Planned Parenthood, should not receive taxpayer funds from federal, state, or local governments.
Rick Beggs Yeah. So what it allows somebody to say is I agree or I disagree. but I know even in some of those, I have seen answers where they'll go, well, that's between A and B for me. And really the issue comes down to maybe the life of the mother. You know, in extreme cases, we
Debbie Wuthnow have a separate question that's an open text question.
Rick Beggs Right. And this is where they get to sort of.
Debbie Wuthnow Yeah.
Rick Beggs Make their decision.
Debbie Wuthnow And this one is, under what circumstances should an elective abortion be allowed? and, you know, we have guidance for the panelists on how do you, you know, what do you look for? We have abolitionists that, you know, every baby should be saved. And then there's others who, you know, for the life of the mother, it potentially could be allowed.
Rick Beggs Well, and what that allows is for somebody who believes this is a hotspot for them. And I look at the right for life one as well. It's very key for me. I don't ever want to vote for. I'm not saying I haven't, but I don't ever want to vote for who doesn't take the value of human life, to be important, especially a child in the womb. But I, I know that some people will kind of hedge on this because it affects the voting in that particular.
Debbie Wuthnow And it all depends on the district they're in. Right. Because there, we've talked about redistricting and there are districts that are, you know, strongly Republican and strongly Democrat and if there's a Republican or then there's the toss ups. Right. That are more in the middle. So in, if there's somebody running in a, a toss up district that's, you know, really, they probably don't want to go on record as saying, I'm going to save every baby. because they wouldn't get those persuadable voters.
Rick Beggs Right.
Debbie Wuthnow Or it gets used against them in the general election for sure.
Rick Beggs So, yeah, it is. The whole thing is really a strategic game.
Debbie Wuthnow Politics. Yeah, it is.
Rick Beggs Yeah. Politics.
Debbie Wuthnow It's political because it is.
Rick Beggs Yeah.
We have questions about the economy on our questionnaire
So, we have questions about the economy.
Debbie Wuthnow Yes, we do on there.
Rick Beggs And do you have one in front of you that we have that's on the questionnaire?
Debbie Wuthnow So what actions would you take? So it's an open text question, really. Let them see what they would do. Would you take that would allow Americans to retain more of their income and wealth? So instead of specifically asking, do you want to balance the budget, do you want to decrease taxes, do you want to do whatever? And kind of guiding them, we're just like, lay it out there. What do you think we should do so that families. I mean, this is our affordability question, if you think about it. So that families get to retain more of the, you know, fruits of their labor.
Rick Beggs Well, it's interesting because, when you deal like things on the economy, you really have to be a wordsmith on how you put these questions out there because you can misread almost. It's sort of like, remember me talking
Debbie Wuthnow about those 20 hour meetings.
Rick Beggs Yeah.
Debbie Wuthnow So 22 hour meetings. We are wordsmithing. So we start by figuring out the topic and then we back and forth on, on the specific wording. specific words. Is it, you know, too general to, you know, does it guide or does it lead? Is it, in fact, sometimes questions, we'll call them double barreled questions. So we don't want to ask would you do this? And this. Because they might say no, meaning they won't do one of them, but they might do the other. And that's where that. Please explain. Puts. Kind of gets crazy.
ABCD questionnaire asks candidates about health care, education and immigration
Rick Beggs So, we have questions about health care.
Debbie Wuthnow Yes, we do.
Rick Beggs Which is very important in our country.
Debbie Wuthnow So that's that ABCD question.
Rick Beggs Yeah.
Debbie Wuthnow and so one of the options is, you know, healthcare for all. The Medicare. Medicare for all. One is, do you want health care to be funded, by the government? but we also want to allow private insurance to. Do you want Medicaid and Medicare to be available? But there is no other. I mean, it's just the government programs or that taxpayer funded health care should be abolished in all forms and Medicaid in America should be defunded. So this is. It's a spectrum in a way that the candidates get to give an answer, but also to qualify that answer.
Rick Beggs And of course a big hot topic a lot of times, especially in border states, even if you. I would think in Texas, Arizona, about immigration.
Debbie Wuthnow Yep.
Rick Beggs We'll have questions regarding that as well.
Debbie Wuthnow So we've asked, should the U.S. do more to secure the southern border? And we also ask under what, what who should be allowed to immigrate and under what circumstances.
Rick Beggs Yeah. So, education's another one. I mean, I can just keep going here, Debbie. I can just rattle.
Debbie Wuthnow It looks like you have the questionnaire
Rick Beggs in front of you. So what I, mean, education is huge and it differs from state to state. So talking about federal might be, do you want to abolish the Department of Education or in the state levels?
Debbie Wuthnow What do you want to do with it?
Rick Beggs What do you want to do with it?
Debbie Wuthnow Right. And so that's why at the federal level we do ask about school choice and that vouchers. But we also ask. I Support eliminating the U.S. department of Education and giving control back to the states and communities. So, you know, if we looked at our education questionnaire, which we can go into detail more, we have different questions, more about the curriculum and the safety of kids and things like that. But these are under the authority of the federal government.
Rick Beggs Yeah.
Debbie Wuthnow Should it be under the authority?
Rick Beggs Well, yes, that's right. values would seem to be a really important.
Debbie Wuthnow These are my tiebreaker questions specifically. So we ask about marriage. Do you believe God is marriage? Is God ordained? Sacred and legal union of a man and a woman. And government does not have the authority to change that. I do. But what does the candidate think? What do they think about children? Are they, says children are the most vulnerable members of society and must be protected from abuse, including gender ideology, grooming and bodily mutilation. We chewed on those words for a long time.
Rick Beggs Talk about wordsmithing. Just trying to figure out what resonates
Debbie Wuthnow and what is, what's problematic, what's truthful without being inflammatory.
Rick Beggs Yeah.
Debbie Wuthnow And what differentiates Republicans and Democrats as well. But my favorite tie breaker, I mean, so we also ask about gender transition and we came at it from the the money angle by asking taxpayer funds should be used to provide gender transition transition services. But then my favorite tie breaker question is describe your spiritual beliefs and values. Can, be revealing? You know, some candidates will say I grew up going to church or I'm
Rick Beggs a Catholic, I'm a born again Christian.
Debbie Wuthnow And we, that's my favorite answer. So, but it's a, it's a good differentiator now.
Rick Beggs I, I didn't, I don't remember. Is there a text box for that one? Oh, a big text box so people can write in a little more specifically.
Debbie Wuthnow Limit the text box size. But it's a pretty big limit because we don't want to read a white paper for every answer.
Rick Beggs That's right.
Debbie Wuthnow But yeah, some candidates will be very concise and some will tell us their whole life story. Yeah. Their testimony.
Rick Beggs You can tell who's run for office before and who hasn't. and then we talked a little bit about the about you section.
Debbie Wuthnow Yeah.
Rick Beggs and I, I just think that those are really eye opening and we've,
Debbie Wuthnow we've chewed on, you know, because we try to keep the questionnaire not too long. Do we really need to ask these questions? you know, have you been convicted of a felony? Have you ever been penalized for sexual misconduct in civil or criminal court? And so please explain, like, isn't that public record? But we feel like the candidate's going to go on record. This is something we need to, you know, say it is public record. Are you being truthful about it? Are you trying to hide something?
Rick Beggs Yeah. So we're aggregating all that information anyway. And like you said earlier in the broadcast, these are data points that will point back to what they've already done in office, how they voted, who gives to them, who they give to. Every one of these things fits in the puzzle so that you can Vote wisely and make a good decision.
Debbie Wuthnow Carefully designed, very prayerfully designed to illuminate the truth about each candidate and where they land on all the. All the issues important to us.
I think these school board races, I cannot tell you how important they are
Rick Beggs Now, we talked, I, think even last week that we really want to do a separate show regarding school board.
Debbie Wuthnow Yes.
Rick Beggs Questionnaires, judicial questionnaires, because they are uniquely different. And I think of the children aspect, of the education question. And now we talk about school board. Now this is work. Sort of the rubber hits the road.
Debbie Wuthnow Exactly.
Rick Beggs The sad thing is a lot of times this is where, in school boards in particular, this is where people cut their teeth to run for office later in life or later down the road if they do well at a school board.
Debbie Wuthnow The farm team.
Rick Beggs Yeah. The sad thing is this is the important team. I know I rant and raped about this many times, but I think these school board races, I cannot tell you how important.
Debbie Wuthnow Stay on your soapbox. It is so important.
Rick Beggs Yeah.
School board races are decided by so few people, uh, registered voters
And so let me get on another soapbox because it just came out. Well, it's this one. And that is. School board races are decided by so few people, who are actually registered voters. you show the, number being 6%, maybe 5 to 7 when
Debbie Wuthnow they're not on the ballot. With other things. Right. When it's a standalone election, the average is.
Rick Beggs It is just you're winning it by 3 percentage points plus one vote, which
Debbie Wuthnow in percentage points you can think, eh, it's not so bad. But, you know, we covered school board races. The ones we covered in 2024. It was almost 300 different races, school boards, across many states. The average winning margin was less than 900 votes. A third of the races, it was less than 400 votes. That was the difference between, you know, winning the seat and not winning the seat. And, you know, if it went to a runoff, it dropped 150 votes. It's what it took to run. So it really, your vote makes a difference.
Rick Beggs It saddens my heart because really that's two. Maybe one church, maybe a quarter of a megachurch. Yeah, yeah. I mean, it's tiny.
Debbie Wuthnow Tiny segment.
Rick Beggs Anyway, I, I think we are going to spend a little bit of time on.
Debbie Wuthnow As we should.
Rick Beggs Yeah. School board races. Anyway, you know what?
Debbie Wuthnow But you better come back. You want to hear.
Rick Beggs Well, you know what that sound is.
It's time, um, for election updates, especially during this primary season
It's time, for election updates, especially during this primary season.
Debbie Wuthnow This coming Tuesday, August 18th, is a big day for elections in Wyoming. Your primary election is here for special election in Senate District 6. Your polls open at 7am they close at 7pm In Pennsylvania, your general election for your House District 12 is here. Polls open at 7am, close at 8pm and Florida, your election that includes the school board candidates I Voter Guide is covering is is coming to on Tuesday. Polls open at 7am, close at 7pm Alaska, your polls open at 7am and close at 7pm and in Arkansas, you have a special primary election for SD1, and the polls open at 7:30am and close at 7:30pm not much going on in the early voting front. Rhode island, you have early voting that is underway for your election on, September 9th. And that's it for elections. Right?
Rick Beggs When are we done with the primary season?
Debbie Wuthnow the 15th of September is the final primary in Delaware. I just, I knew that off the top of my head.
Rick Beggs A month from now.
Debbie Wuthnow Yeah.
Rick Beggs Great. Well, listen, we are so grateful that you tuned in to listen to Debbie and I today on the Compass. the Compass is the official radio show of I Voter guide and I voterguide.com which is where you can find a lot of information if you want to learn how to vote wisely. We also need to let you know that we are a part of afa, American Family association and American Family Association Action, which is, where we find ourselves at iVoterGuide You can reach us at where, Debbie,
Debbie Wuthnow if you email compassivoterguide.com we have a team that will answer any questions that you have. And if you have something you want Rick and I to talk about on the air, please email us at [email protected] and we will address that in a future show.
Rick Beggs And many of you have asked, where could I find other broadcasts that you guys have done? Well, funny you should ask that question. You can find us at, ah, on the AFR app. You got to go download that. You can find not only our show, but so many other shows, placed by American Family Radio. Or you can go look us [email protected] and that is the official, radio website for AFR. We are grounded in God and rooted in research. Our producer is Brent Austin, and we're grateful he's always around. But at the Compass, we always want you to know that our true north will always be Jesus. And so that's why we base the show on. Thank you for joining us. Debbie will see you next week. Happy, birthday.
Debbie Wuthnow See you next week.
so that they could kind of walk through somebody, a candidate that they had in. In, on their ballot. So it allows them to kind of see what questions we're asking. And, and maybe we should talk a little bit about some of those, Debbie, because we did talk about what we used to ask. And then, four years come and go, two years, new things have become more important than they were two, four years ago. But there are some pretty stable questions that we have along the way.
There are several questions on abortion that are open to interpretation. Let's talk about some of those. Well, like, uh, there's a
Let's talk about some of those.
Debbie Wuthnow Well, like, there's a right to life question about.
Rick Beggs Seems like a good place to start.
Debbie Wuthnow There is, and it would be, do you want Planned Parenthood to be funded? So the actual wording is abortion providers, including Planned Parenthood, should not receive taxpayer funds from federal, state, or local governments.
Rick Beggs Yeah. So what it allows somebody to say is I agree or I disagree. but I know even in some of those, I have seen answers where they'll go, well, that's between A and B for me. And really the issue comes down to maybe the life of the mother. You know, in extreme cases, we
Debbie Wuthnow have a separate question that's an open text question.
Rick Beggs Right. And this is where they get to sort of.
Debbie Wuthnow Yeah.
Rick Beggs Make their decision.
Debbie Wuthnow And this one is, under what circumstances should an elective abortion be allowed? and, you know, we have guidance for the panelists on how do you, you know, what do you look for? We have abolitionists that, you know, every baby should be saved. And then there's others who, you know, for the life of the mother, it potentially could be allowed.
Rick Beggs Well, and what that allows is for somebody who believes this is a hotspot for them. And I look at the right for life one as well. It's very key for me. I don't ever want to vote for. I'm not saying I haven't, but I don't ever want to vote for who doesn't take the value of human life, to be important, especially a child in the womb. But I, I know that some people will kind of hedge on this because it affects the voting in that particular.
Debbie Wuthnow And it all depends on the district they're in. Right. Because there, we've talked about redistricting and there are districts that are, you know, strongly Republican and strongly Democrat and if there's a Republican or then there's the toss ups. Right. That are more in the middle. So in, if there's somebody running in a, a toss up district that's, you know, really, they probably don't want to go on record as saying, I'm going to save every baby. because they wouldn't get those persuadable voters.
Rick Beggs Right.
Debbie Wuthnow Or it gets used against them in the general election for sure.
Rick Beggs So, yeah, it is. The whole thing is really a strategic game.
Debbie Wuthnow Politics. Yeah, it is.
Rick Beggs Yeah. Politics.
Debbie Wuthnow It's political because it is.
Rick Beggs Yeah.
We have questions about the economy on our questionnaire
So, we have questions about the economy.
Debbie Wuthnow Yes, we do on there.
Rick Beggs And do you have one in front of you that we have that's on the questionnaire?
Debbie Wuthnow So what actions would you take? So it's an open text question, really. Let them see what they would do. Would you take that would allow Americans to retain more of their income and wealth? So instead of specifically asking, do you want to balance the budget, do you want to decrease taxes, do you want to do whatever? And kind of guiding them, we're just like, lay it out there. What do you think we should do so that families. I mean, this is our affordability question, if you think about it. So that families get to retain more of the, you know, fruits of their labor.
Rick Beggs Well, it's interesting because, when you deal like things on the economy, you really have to be a wordsmith on how you put these questions out there because you can misread almost. It's sort of like, remember me talking
Debbie Wuthnow about those 20 hour meetings.
Rick Beggs Yeah.
Debbie Wuthnow So 22 hour meetings. We are wordsmithing. So we start by figuring out the topic and then we back and forth on, on the specific wording. specific words. Is it, you know, too general to, you know, does it guide or does it lead? Is it, in fact, sometimes questions, we'll call them double barreled questions. So we don't want to ask would you do this? And this. Because they might say no, meaning they won't do one of them, but they might do the other. And that's where that. Please explain. Puts. Kind of gets crazy.
ABCD questionnaire asks candidates about health care, education and immigration
Rick Beggs So, we have questions about health care.
Debbie Wuthnow Yes, we do.
Rick Beggs Which is very important in our country.
Debbie Wuthnow So that's that ABCD question.
Rick Beggs Yeah.
Debbie Wuthnow and so one of the options is, you know, healthcare for all. The Medicare. Medicare for all. One is, do you want health care to be funded, by the government? but we also want to allow private insurance to. Do you want Medicaid and Medicare to be available? But there is no other. I mean, it's just the government programs or that taxpayer funded health care should be abolished in all forms and Medicaid in America should be defunded. So this is. It's a spectrum in a way that the candidates get to give an answer, but also to qualify that answer.
Rick Beggs And of course a big hot topic a lot of times, especially in border states, even if you. I would think in Texas, Arizona, about immigration.
Debbie Wuthnow Yep.
Rick Beggs We'll have questions regarding that as well.
Debbie Wuthnow So we've asked, should the U.S. do more to secure the southern border? And we also ask under what, what who should be allowed to immigrate and under what circumstances.
Rick Beggs Yeah. So, education's another one. I mean, I can just keep going here, Debbie. I can just rattle.
Debbie Wuthnow It looks like you have the questionnaire
Rick Beggs in front of you. So what I, mean, education is huge and it differs from state to state. So talking about federal might be, do you want to abolish the Department of Education or in the state levels?
Debbie Wuthnow What do you want to do with it?
Rick Beggs What do you want to do with it?
Debbie Wuthnow Right. And so that's why at the federal level we do ask about school choice and that vouchers. But we also ask. I Support eliminating the U.S. department of Education and giving control back to the states and communities. So, you know, if we looked at our education questionnaire, which we can go into detail more, we have different questions, more about the curriculum and the safety of kids and things like that. But these are under the authority of the federal government.
Rick Beggs Yeah.
Debbie Wuthnow Should it be under the authority?
Rick Beggs Well, yes, that's right. values would seem to be a really important.
Debbie Wuthnow These are my tiebreaker questions specifically. So we ask about marriage. Do you believe God is marriage? Is God ordained? Sacred and legal union of a man and a woman. And government does not have the authority to change that. I do. But what does the candidate think? What do they think about children? Are they, says children are the most vulnerable members of society and must be protected from abuse, including gender ideology, grooming and bodily mutilation. We chewed on those words for a long time.
Rick Beggs Talk about wordsmithing. Just trying to figure out what resonates
Debbie Wuthnow and what is, what's problematic, what's truthful without being inflammatory.
Rick Beggs Yeah.
Debbie Wuthnow And what differentiates Republicans and Democrats as well. But my favorite tie breaker, I mean, so we also ask about gender transition and we came at it from the the money angle by asking taxpayer funds should be used to provide gender transition transition services. But then my favorite tie breaker question is describe your spiritual beliefs and values. Can, be revealing? You know, some candidates will say I grew up going to church or I'm
Rick Beggs a Catholic, I'm a born again Christian.
Debbie Wuthnow And we, that's my favorite answer. So, but it's a, it's a good differentiator now.
Rick Beggs I, I didn't, I don't remember. Is there a text box for that one? Oh, a big text box so people can write in a little more specifically.
Debbie Wuthnow Limit the text box size. But it's a pretty big limit because we don't want to read a white paper for every answer.
Rick Beggs That's right.
Debbie Wuthnow But yeah, some candidates will be very concise and some will tell us their whole life story. Yeah. Their testimony.
Rick Beggs You can tell who's run for office before and who hasn't. and then we talked a little bit about the about you section.
Debbie Wuthnow Yeah.
Rick Beggs and I, I just think that those are really eye opening and we've,
Debbie Wuthnow we've chewed on, you know, because we try to keep the questionnaire not too long. Do we really need to ask these questions? you know, have you been convicted of a felony? Have you ever been penalized for sexual misconduct in civil or criminal court? And so please explain, like, isn't that public record? But we feel like the candidate's going to go on record. This is something we need to, you know, say it is public record. Are you being truthful about it? Are you trying to hide something?
Rick Beggs Yeah. So we're aggregating all that information anyway. And like you said earlier in the broadcast, these are data points that will point back to what they've already done in office, how they voted, who gives to them, who they give to. Every one of these things fits in the puzzle so that you can Vote wisely and make a good decision.
Debbie Wuthnow Carefully designed, very prayerfully designed to illuminate the truth about each candidate and where they land on all the. All the issues important to us.
I think these school board races, I cannot tell you how important they are
Rick Beggs Now, we talked, I, think even last week that we really want to do a separate show regarding school board.
Debbie Wuthnow Yes.
Rick Beggs Questionnaires, judicial questionnaires, because they are uniquely different. And I think of the children aspect, of the education question. And now we talk about school board. Now this is work. Sort of the rubber hits the road.
Debbie Wuthnow Exactly.
Rick Beggs The sad thing is a lot of times this is where, in school boards in particular, this is where people cut their teeth to run for office later in life or later down the road if they do well at a school board.
Debbie Wuthnow The farm team.
Rick Beggs Yeah. The sad thing is this is the important team. I know I rant and raped about this many times, but I think these school board races, I cannot tell you how important.
Debbie Wuthnow Stay on your soapbox. It is so important.
Rick Beggs Yeah.
School board races are decided by so few people, uh, registered voters
And so let me get on another soapbox because it just came out. Well, it's this one. And that is. School board races are decided by so few people, who are actually registered voters. you show the, number being 6%, maybe 5 to 7 when
Debbie Wuthnow they're not on the ballot. With other things. Right. When it's a standalone election, the average is.
Rick Beggs It is just you're winning it by 3 percentage points plus one vote, which
Debbie Wuthnow in percentage points you can think, eh, it's not so bad. But, you know, we covered school board races. The ones we covered in 2024. It was almost 300 different races, school boards, across many states. The average winning margin was less than 900 votes. A third of the races, it was less than 400 votes. That was the difference between, you know, winning the seat and not winning the seat. And, you know, if it went to a runoff, it dropped 150 votes. It's what it took to run. So it really, your vote makes a difference.
Rick Beggs It saddens my heart because really that's two. Maybe one church, maybe a quarter of a megachurch. Yeah, yeah. I mean, it's tiny.
Debbie Wuthnow Tiny segment.
Rick Beggs Anyway, I, I think we are going to spend a little bit of time on.
Debbie Wuthnow As we should.
Rick Beggs Yeah. School board races. Anyway, you know what?
Debbie Wuthnow But you better come back. You want to hear.
Rick Beggs Well, you know what that sound is.
It's time, um, for election updates, especially during this primary season
It's time, for election updates, especially during this primary season.
Debbie Wuthnow This coming Tuesday, August 18th, is a big day for elections in Wyoming. Your primary election is here for special election in Senate District 6. Your polls open at 7am they close at 7pm In Pennsylvania, your general election for your House District 12 is here. Polls open at 7am, close at 8pm and Florida, your election that includes the school board candidates I Voter Guide is covering is is coming to on Tuesday. Polls open at 7am, close at 7pm Alaska, your polls open at 7am and close at 7pm and in Arkansas, you have a special primary election for SD1, and the polls open at 7:30am and close at 7:30pm not much going on in the early voting front. Rhode island, you have early voting that is underway for your election on, September 9th. And that's it for elections. Right?
Rick Beggs When are we done with the primary season?
Debbie Wuthnow the 15th of September is the final primary in Delaware. I just, I knew that off the top of my head.
Rick Beggs A month from now.
Debbie Wuthnow Yeah.
Rick Beggs Great. Well, listen, we are so grateful that you tuned in to listen to Debbie and I today on the Compass. the Compass is the official radio show of I Voter guide and I voterguide.com which is where you can find a lot of information if you want to learn how to vote wisely. We also need to let you know that we are a part of afa, American Family association and American Family Association Action, which is, where we find ourselves at iVoterGuide You can reach us at where, Debbie,
Debbie Wuthnow if you email compassivoterguide.com we have a team that will answer any questions that you have. And if you have something you want Rick and I to talk about on the air, please email us at [email protected] and we will address that in a future show.
Rick Beggs And many of you have asked, where could I find other broadcasts that you guys have done? Well, funny you should ask that question. You can find us at, ah, on the AFR app. You got to go download that. You can find not only our show, but so many other shows, placed by American Family Radio. Or you can go look us [email protected] and that is the official, radio website for AFR. We are grounded in God and rooted in research. Our producer is Brent Austin, and we're grateful he's always around. But at the Compass, we always want you to know that our true north will always be Jesus. And so that's why we base the show on. Thank you for joining us. Debbie will see you next week. Happy, birthday.
Debbie Wuthnow See you next week.
The Compass is the radio show. Navigating the public square together with faith, truth and conviction
Rick Beggs Welcome to the Compass. Navigating the public square together with faith, truth and conviction. Well, good afternoon. We're so glad you're with us on the Compass. The Compass is the radio show. The official radio show, I might add to iVoterGuide and ivoterguide.com that little voice you just heard is Debbie. What now? She is my co host and she is the president of iVoterGuide voter guide. And today, yeah, is a special day. I know. you know, I'm controlling the mic so I get to say it. It's Debbie's birthday. Let's all sing. No, no. if you're in your car or at your home, I would like you to sing. I'm not gonna sing.
Debbie Wuthnow Are you gonna. I'm not singing to myself.
Rick Beggs I know, but did you. You know what? I have a next, week is my.
Debbie Wuthnow I know. Next week. I'll sing to you.
Rick Beggs Next week you're gonna sing.
Debbie Wuthnow I will. Seriously, next week.
Rick Beggs I love it. I will hold you to it. I will tape it. I will have Willie B tape it back in Tupelo and he could put
Debbie Wuthnow some music in, some background. Background singers.
Rick Beggs I don't know if you remember, but Happy birthday is music. And if it's not coming out of your mouth as music, then I'm going to need to replace the vocals.
Debbie Wuthnow We need backup vocals.
Rick Beggs We're so glad you joined our show.
Debbie remembers having a birthday in the summer when there was no school
Just so we could talk about Debbie. You know what was hard about having a birthday in the summer?
Debbie Wuthnow no. There's no party at school. Everybody gets a party at school. Mom brings cupcakes, and there's no school, so I didn't get that. I didn't get cupcakes. Did you?
Rick Beggs Well, I was pretty popular. I. I don't want to brag.
Debbie Wuthnow Rub it in.
Rick Beggs No, I mean, you're right. There was nothing special that you could enjoy at school or your friends coming up and doing, you know, your girlfriends
Debbie Wuthnow making things for you. Mom says, what do you want for dinner? And that was. That was it.
Rick Beggs Yeah. That's what we got. That's right. Sometimes I got a butterfly cake, but
Debbie Wuthnow this time I got Rick on the radio.
Rick Beggs I know. Happy birthday to you.
Debbie Wuthnow Thank you, Rick.
Rick Beggs I'm glad to do this with you.
We talk about I voter guide questionnaire and how voters should use it
I. I want to kind of jump off from where we ended last show, which was jumping up from the show that we did the week before because we've been talking about the questionnaire that we have on iVoterGuide voter guide. And when you go into ivoterguide.com, put your name in there.
Debbie Wuthnow If you've never done that your address, not your name.
Rick Beggs That's correct. That is correct. Is your address. I stand corrected. And so when you do that, your ballot comes up and you get to see all your candidates, Right?
Debbie Wuthnow Well, at the time for your election.
Rick Beggs But yeah, and at the very, one of the areas that we look at as a questionnaire, that's why we're kind of going over this is to why is that important? We've sort of answered that on the last two shows and then maybe even how candidates view it. But we thought we would talk about, today is what are we looking for when we're making these decisions about whether somebody is conservative or liberal or moderate, whatever the case may be. And so what are we looking for in the questions? And then how are we using it?
Debbie Wuthnow Oh, you're right. How do we use it? But also I think how voters should use it. Just give them some little tips.
Rick Beggs Okay.
Debbie Wuthnow Of how to interpret it.
Candidates will complain our questionnaires are too long
Rick Beggs So that's where I want to jump off on. So how do you want, how do you want to answer those questions?
Debbie Wuthnow I think let's start by the types of questions we ask. Okay, so, most of our questions. So candidates will complain our questionnaires too long. I had a friend who ran for, an office in Texas, and he's like, oh, my gosh, I spent hours on your questionnaire. But we try to cover as many topics as we can because voters want to know. So it's about 30, 35 questions on average, sometimes a little less. But we try to make it, as efficient as possible. So most of the questions are what I would call a. It's a statement. It will read as a statement. And then the candidate can say anywhere from strongly agree, agree, some, I don't, indifferent, I don't care, I don't know, and answer it that way.
Rick Beggs But then you do have questions where they can actually write in some answers.
Debbie Wuthnow Right. Open text question. So it's just a question and they get a box. But interestingly, we've learned that by adding a little, box below even those statement questions. So they can select their strongly agree to strongly disagree. And then we just give a please explain and give them a box. And sometimes what they give is pretty illuminating in, how they qualify.
Rick Beggs So they answered a question, but they spoke it their answer differently than their.
Debbie Wuthnow And sometimes they're trying to justify or rationalize why they said what they said. Sometimes they'll give an exception to what they said. Like most of the time, I mean that, but in this case, I mean something different. So, One of the ways we look at that is for consistency. Are they being consistent in their responses, and really just reading through what they've said. Because it can be more illuminating with. Once the candidate just starts to speak as it is, you know, in writing and answering those questions, do you
Rick Beggs find that most, of the candidates will write in or are they just looking to say yes or no? Sort of like talking to your teenager?
Debbie Wuthnow We see both. I would see there's candidates who are like, I don't have time for this. And they probably the incumbents more so that just, you know, get it done as quickly as they can, say, strongly agree, move on, move on, move on. I think more so the challengers who know where they're trying to communicate and they, you know, maybe sometimes they over communicate, but it's great. Voters want to hear what you have to say, so that gives them that opportunity to say more there.
Rick Beggs so we look at the consistency and how they answer and especially if they actually spell it out in a written form, what else are we looking for?
Debbie Wuthnow Well, when it's an open text question, right. It is a specific question. So we look for did they really answer the question or did they kind of talk around it? You know, politicians are kind of famous for the pivot to what they want to say. So are they really addressing our question? Are they saying something about another topic and trying to evade answering the actual question that we ask them?
Rick Beggs Well, and I've noticed on some of my candidates, in the state of Georgia, where you will have, they will have five choices, A through E, I guess, and you'll go, is it this? Is it that? Is it this? And they're supposed to pick one. And some will say, well, it's between B and C. But I think what they're trying to do is they're trying not to wipe out part of the population that might disagree with them on C because they're a B follower. But it's interesting how they game it or try to game it.
Debbie Wuthnow And how do you look at that? Do you. I mean, you have to kind of say, well, you know, I'm kind of. Could be either. I, maybe I see both sides. Depends on the audience or whatever it is. That's. I think our healthcare question, right, Gives, gives those types of options. So, that's why we'd like to hear what the candidate has to say. Explain it.
Rick Beggs Yeah. So, outside of that, what's. What's another thing that we are looking.
Debbie Wuthnow Well, I sense consistency in Just with, with the statement response and what they put in the text box. But we're also looking for consistency with all the other data points we've gathered. Right. They say they're strongly pro life, but yet they got a donation from Planned Parenthood. So we kind of try to compare that up to your scorecards. If they've got them.
Rick Beggs Right.
Debbie Wuthnow campaign finance, if they. A lot of them will have that. So just consistency across the board, you know, for that. Again, we're looking for the evidence and the questionnaire is what they say, but what they do has more weight. So just kind of look at the whole package. Right. It's same as Bible study. Look at all of it. Context.
Rick Beggs Yeah.
Debbie Wuthnow The whole.
Rick Beggs Yeah. In some respects, we're like CSI of voting, and we're trying to put all the pieces together so that when the voter goes to look up their ballot, they have everything available to them so they can vote wisely. Which is really the theme of why we have aggregated all this information.
Debbie Wuthnow We say that on the website.
Rick Beggs We do, we do. It's our subset of I vote, grounded
Debbie Wuthnow in God, rooted in research. So that you can vote wisely.
Rick Beggs Yeah. Okay, so we have those two things that we're doing.
Panelists use questionnaire to help voters pick between candidates in primaries
What else are we doing when we're looking at all this?
Debbie Wuthnow Well, we're getting ready to vote. Right. So I will say that, especially in a primary election, when you're trying to choose between candidates in your party, that's where I really try to dive deeper. frequently I've had candidates, you know, multiple candidates get the same rating, you know, ideally verified conservative, but even then you still have to pick. So where are you going to figure out which candidate that you're. That I'm going to vote for, you're going to vote for. So reading the details of the answers on the candidate, and really read the whole thing, especially I. We will say it takes the candidate a lot of time to do this. And I know they get questionnaires from dozens of groups. Any group that wants, you know, an endorsement, they're. They're constantly answering questionnaires. So we want to give, give them that return in reading what they've said, really thinking about it, looking for consistency. And, I will say that when a candidate takes the time to answer our questionnaire, we do our best to assign a rating to them. I don't think we've ever had a candidate answer the questionnaire that got insufficient information. So there are candidates that we do rate that way because they don't answer the questionnaire.
Rick Beggs Right.
Debbie Wuthnow They don't have scorecards. They've maybe given a donation to the. From the Republican Party. It's not really enough to sign a rating, but if the candidate takes the time to answer the questionnaire, we will place them on our gas gauge somewhere.
Rick Beggs Yeah, and I, And I've said this before on our broadcast, but I really use it as my tiebreaker, especially in the primaries. First of all, if they answered the questionnaire, you already get a little check on my list. And then if they both have, then I get to walk through all of.
Debbie Wuthnow And I even, like, now we have this, comparison feature. If they've both answered the questionnaire. If you, go back to the race page, where it lists all the candidates that are in a race, and you can check the box under the two candidates that maybe answer the questionnaire that you want to compare, you're trying to decide between, and then go to the comparison page and click the, the questionnaire. You can literally see their answers side by side.
Rick Beggs Oh, okay.
Debbie Wuthnow So it makes it really easy to see which one's, you know, more evasive or answer the question or, you know, aligns with you more.
Rick Beggs So it's like shopping for a hotel in one city, and you got them all right next to each other.
Debbie Wuthnow And the website is that like. I mean, it's got the little box kind of like when you're looking for a computer at Best Buy, and you check the boxes and then you click the compare. So, our team did a great job with that.
Rick Beggs So have we covered. How do we use this when we get all this information? How are the panel. How is everybody going through this? I mean, do you have find yourself where you got all this information about one candidate and now you got to apply a rating to them?
Debbie Wuthnow but it is just one part of it. So, if you've never been a panelist, and, we've talked before about how we really do need panelists.
Rick Beggs Sign up. We need panelists. We're always looking for panelists.
Debbie Wuthnow Need panelists. So the panelists are the first people who read everything, right? They're reading every candidate answer. They're checking out their website and their social media. But on. And it all happens on our, Our back end on that database website. So to facilitate them in putting together the pieces as they're reading an answer to a questionnaire, they actually can assign a score for each question and kind of give it a. A percentile. And we have for them guidance of what we're looking for. You know, what are, if they, you know, if they answer this, we're, you know, at least give them 80% so they can. And we give them guidance in what to look for on each question. And then we put all those pieces together and they give an overall score to the questionnaire, and then they can give a score to their website and their social media individually. And then we ask them to look at it all as a picture and, and average that of, you know, where do you see conservative positions or what we call data points? Or where do you see liberal positions or data points? And our criteria of where you land on the gas gauge is based upon those liberal and conservative data points. And it could be, you know, a couple of answers on the questionnaire could
Rick Beggs be that kind of throw you one way.
Debbie Wuthnow Yeah.
Rick Beggs now, we have gone over the questionnaire thoroughly. I don't know if we've done it correctly.
Debbie Wuthnow Well, we've done from a high level.
Rick Beggs Yes, we have. I wish what we would have done is told every time we got on the broadcast is to say, okay, pull up your last ballot.
Debbie Wuthnow Say it now.
Rick Beggs An
The Compass is the radio show. Navigating the public square together with faith, truth and conviction
Rick Beggs Welcome to the Compass. Navigating the public square together with faith, truth and conviction. Well, good afternoon. We're so glad you're with us on the Compass. The Compass is the radio show. The official radio show, I might add to iVoterGuide and ivoterguide.com that little voice you just heard is Debbie. What now? She is my co host and she is the president of iVoterGuide voter guide. And today, yeah, is a special day. I know. you know, I'm controlling the mic so I get to say it. It's Debbie's birthday. Let's all sing. No, no. if you're in your car or at your home, I would like you to sing. I'm not gonna sing.
Debbie Wuthnow Are you gonna. I'm not singing to myself.
Rick Beggs I know, but did you. You know what? I have a next, week is my.
Debbie Wuthnow I know. Next week. I'll sing to you.
Rick Beggs Next week you're gonna sing.
Debbie Wuthnow I will. Seriously, next week.
Rick Beggs I love it. I will hold you to it. I will tape it. I will have Willie B tape it back in Tupelo and he could put
Debbie Wuthnow some music in, some background. Background singers.
Rick Beggs I don't know if you remember, but Happy birthday is music. And if it's not coming out of your mouth as music, then I'm going to need to replace the vocals.
Debbie Wuthnow We need backup vocals.
Rick Beggs We're so glad you joined our show.
Debbie remembers having a birthday in the summer when there was no school
Just so we could talk about Debbie. You know what was hard about having a birthday in the summer?
Debbie Wuthnow no. There's no party at school. Everybody gets a party at school. Mom brings cupcakes, and there's no school, so I didn't get that. I didn't get cupcakes. Did you?
Rick Beggs Well, I was pretty popular. I. I don't want to brag.
Debbie Wuthnow Rub it in.
Rick Beggs No, I mean, you're right. There was nothing special that you could enjoy at school or your friends coming up and doing, you know, your girlfriends
Debbie Wuthnow making things for you. Mom says, what do you want for dinner? And that was. That was it.
Rick Beggs Yeah. That's what we got. That's right. Sometimes I got a butterfly cake, but
Debbie Wuthnow this time I got Rick on the radio.
Rick Beggs I know. Happy birthday to you.
Debbie Wuthnow Thank you, Rick.
Rick Beggs I'm glad to do this with you.
We talk about I voter guide questionnaire and how voters should use it
I. I want to kind of jump off from where we ended last show, which was jumping up from the show that we did the week before because we've been talking about the questionnaire that we have on iVoterGuide voter guide. And when you go into ivoterguide.com, put your name in there.
Debbie Wuthnow If you've never done that your address, not your name.
Rick Beggs That's correct. That is correct. Is your address. I stand corrected. And so when you do that, your ballot comes up and you get to see all your candidates, Right?
Debbie Wuthnow Well, at the time for your election.
Rick Beggs But yeah, and at the very, one of the areas that we look at as a questionnaire, that's why we're kind of going over this is to why is that important? We've sort of answered that on the last two shows and then maybe even how candidates view it. But we thought we would talk about, today is what are we looking for when we're making these decisions about whether somebody is conservative or liberal or moderate, whatever the case may be. And so what are we looking for in the questions? And then how are we using it?
Debbie Wuthnow Oh, you're right. How do we use it? But also I think how voters should use it. Just give them some little tips.
Rick Beggs Okay.
Debbie Wuthnow Of how to interpret it.
Candidates will complain our questionnaires are too long
Rick Beggs So that's where I want to jump off on. So how do you want, how do you want to answer those questions?
Debbie Wuthnow I think let's start by the types of questions we ask. Okay, so, most of our questions. So candidates will complain our questionnaires too long. I had a friend who ran for, an office in Texas, and he's like, oh, my gosh, I spent hours on your questionnaire. But we try to cover as many topics as we can because voters want to know. So it's about 30, 35 questions on average, sometimes a little less. But we try to make it, as efficient as possible. So most of the questions are what I would call a. It's a statement. It will read as a statement. And then the candidate can say anywhere from strongly agree, agree, some, I don't, indifferent, I don't care, I don't know, and answer it that way.
Rick Beggs But then you do have questions where they can actually write in some answers.
Debbie Wuthnow Right. Open text question. So it's just a question and they get a box. But interestingly, we've learned that by adding a little, box below even those statement questions. So they can select their strongly agree to strongly disagree. And then we just give a please explain and give them a box. And sometimes what they give is pretty illuminating in, how they qualify.
Rick Beggs So they answered a question, but they spoke it their answer differently than their.
Debbie Wuthnow And sometimes they're trying to justify or rationalize why they said what they said. Sometimes they'll give an exception to what they said. Like most of the time, I mean that, but in this case, I mean something different. So, One of the ways we look at that is for consistency. Are they being consistent in their responses, and really just reading through what they've said. Because it can be more illuminating with. Once the candidate just starts to speak as it is, you know, in writing and answering those questions, do you
Rick Beggs find that most, of the candidates will write in or are they just looking to say yes or no? Sort of like talking to your teenager?
Debbie Wuthnow We see both. I would see there's candidates who are like, I don't have time for this. And they probably the incumbents more so that just, you know, get it done as quickly as they can, say, strongly agree, move on, move on, move on. I think more so the challengers who know where they're trying to communicate and they, you know, maybe sometimes they over communicate, but it's great. Voters want to hear what you have to say, so that gives them that opportunity to say more there.
Rick Beggs so we look at the consistency and how they answer and especially if they actually spell it out in a written form, what else are we looking for?
Debbie Wuthnow Well, when it's an open text question, right. It is a specific question. So we look for did they really answer the question or did they kind of talk around it? You know, politicians are kind of famous for the pivot to what they want to say. So are they really addressing our question? Are they saying something about another topic and trying to evade answering the actual question that we ask them?
Rick Beggs Well, and I've noticed on some of my candidates, in the state of Georgia, where you will have, they will have five choices, A through E, I guess, and you'll go, is it this? Is it that? Is it this? And they're supposed to pick one. And some will say, well, it's between B and C. But I think what they're trying to do is they're trying not to wipe out part of the population that might disagree with them on C because they're a B follower. But it's interesting how they game it or try to game it.
Debbie Wuthnow And how do you look at that? Do you. I mean, you have to kind of say, well, you know, I'm kind of. Could be either. I, maybe I see both sides. Depends on the audience or whatever it is. That's. I think our healthcare question, right, Gives, gives those types of options. So, that's why we'd like to hear what the candidate has to say. Explain it.
Rick Beggs Yeah. So, outside of that, what's. What's another thing that we are looking.
Debbie Wuthnow Well, I sense consistency in Just with, with the statement response and what they put in the text box. But we're also looking for consistency with all the other data points we've gathered. Right. They say they're strongly pro life, but yet they got a donation from Planned Parenthood. So we kind of try to compare that up to your scorecards. If they've got them.
Rick Beggs Right.
Debbie Wuthnow campaign finance, if they. A lot of them will have that. So just consistency across the board, you know, for that. Again, we're looking for the evidence and the questionnaire is what they say, but what they do has more weight. So just kind of look at the whole package. Right. It's same as Bible study. Look at all of it. Context.
Rick Beggs Yeah.
Debbie Wuthnow The whole.
Rick Beggs Yeah. In some respects, we're like CSI of voting, and we're trying to put all the pieces together so that when the voter goes to look up their ballot, they have everything available to them so they can vote wisely. Which is really the theme of why we have aggregated all this information.
Debbie Wuthnow We say that on the website.
Rick Beggs We do, we do. It's our subset of I vote, grounded
Debbie Wuthnow in God, rooted in research. So that you can vote wisely.
Rick Beggs Yeah. Okay, so we have those two things that we're doing.
Panelists use questionnaire to help voters pick between candidates in primaries
What else are we doing when we're looking at all this?
Debbie Wuthnow Well, we're getting ready to vote. Right. So I will say that, especially in a primary election, when you're trying to choose between candidates in your party, that's where I really try to dive deeper. frequently I've had candidates, you know, multiple candidates get the same rating, you know, ideally verified conservative, but even then you still have to pick. So where are you going to figure out which candidate that you're. That I'm going to vote for, you're going to vote for. So reading the details of the answers on the candidate, and really read the whole thing, especially I. We will say it takes the candidate a lot of time to do this. And I know they get questionnaires from dozens of groups. Any group that wants, you know, an endorsement, they're. They're constantly answering questionnaires. So we want to give, give them that return in reading what they've said, really thinking about it, looking for consistency. And, I will say that when a candidate takes the time to answer our questionnaire, we do our best to assign a rating to them. I don't think we've ever had a candidate answer the questionnaire that got insufficient information. So there are candidates that we do rate that way because they don't answer the questionnaire.
Rick Beggs Right.
Debbie Wuthnow They don't have scorecards. They've maybe given a donation to the. From the Republican Party. It's not really enough to sign a rating, but if the candidate takes the time to answer the questionnaire, we will place them on our gas gauge somewhere.
Rick Beggs Yeah, and I, And I've said this before on our broadcast, but I really use it as my tiebreaker, especially in the primaries. First of all, if they answered the questionnaire, you already get a little check on my list. And then if they both have, then I get to walk through all of.
Debbie Wuthnow And I even, like, now we have this, comparison feature. If they've both answered the questionnaire. If you, go back to the race page, where it lists all the candidates that are in a race, and you can check the box under the two candidates that maybe answer the questionnaire that you want to compare, you're trying to decide between, and then go to the comparison page and click the, the questionnaire. You can literally see their answers side by side.
Rick Beggs Oh, okay.
Debbie Wuthnow So it makes it really easy to see which one's, you know, more evasive or answer the question or, you know, aligns with you more.
Rick Beggs So it's like shopping for a hotel in one city, and you got them all right next to each other.
Debbie Wuthnow And the website is that like. I mean, it's got the little box kind of like when you're looking for a computer at Best Buy, and you check the boxes and then you click the compare. So, our team did a great job with that.
Rick Beggs So have we covered. How do we use this when we get all this information? How are the panel. How is everybody going through this? I mean, do you have find yourself where you got all this information about one candidate and now you got to apply a rating to them?
Debbie Wuthnow but it is just one part of it. So, if you've never been a panelist, and, we've talked before about how we really do need panelists.
Rick Beggs Sign up. We need panelists. We're always looking for panelists.
Debbie Wuthnow Need panelists. So the panelists are the first people who read everything, right? They're reading every candidate answer. They're checking out their website and their social media. But on. And it all happens on our, Our back end on that database website. So to facilitate them in putting together the pieces as they're reading an answer to a questionnaire, they actually can assign a score for each question and kind of give it a. A percentile. And we have for them guidance of what we're looking for. You know, what are, if they, you know, if they answer this, we're, you know, at least give them 80% so they can. And we give them guidance in what to look for on each question. And then we put all those pieces together and they give an overall score to the questionnaire, and then they can give a score to their website and their social media individually. And then we ask them to look at it all as a picture and, and average that of, you know, where do you see conservative positions or what we call data points? Or where do you see liberal positions or data points? And our criteria of where you land on the gas gauge is based upon those liberal and conservative data points. And it could be, you know, a couple of answers on the questionnaire could
Rick Beggs be that kind of throw you one way.
Debbie Wuthnow Yeah.
Rick Beggs now, we have gone over the questionnaire thoroughly. I don't know if we've done it correctly.
Debbie Wuthnow Well, we've done from a high level.
Rick Beggs Yes, we have. I wish what we would have done is told every time we got on the broadcast is to say, okay, pull up your last ballot.
Debbie Wuthnow Say it now.
Rick Beggs An I voter guide, so that they could kind of walk through somebody, a candidate that they had in. In, on their ballot. So it allows them to kind of see what questions we're asking. And, and maybe we should talk a little bit about some of those, Debbie, because we did talk about what we used to ask. And then, four years come and go, two years, new things have become more important than they were two, four years ago. But there are some pretty stable questions that we have along the way.
There are several questions on abortion that are open to interpretation. Let's talk about some of those. Well, like, uh, there's a
Let's talk about some of those.
Debbie Wuthnow Well, like, there's a right to life question about.
Rick Beggs Seems like a good place to start.
Debbie Wuthnow There is, and it would be, do you want Planned Parenthood to be funded? So the actual wording is abortion providers, including Planned Parenthood, should not receive taxpayer funds from federal, state, or local governments.
Rick Beggs Yeah. So what it allows somebody to say is I agree or I disagree. but I know even in some of those, I have seen answers where they'll go, well, that's between A and B for me. And really the issue comes down to maybe the life of the mother. You know, in extreme cases, we
Debbie Wuthnow have a separate question that's an open text question.
Rick Beggs Right. And this is where they get to sort of.
Debbie Wuthnow Yeah.
Rick Beggs Make their decision.
Debbie Wuthnow And this one is, under what circumstances should an elective abortion be allowed? and, you know, we have guidance for the panelists on how do you, you know, what do you look for? We have abolitionists that, you know, every baby should be saved. And then there's others who, you know, for the life of the mother, it potentially could be allowed.
Rick Beggs Well, and what that allows is for somebody who believes this is a hotspot for them. And I look at the right for life one as well. It's very key for me. I don't ever want to vote for. I'm not saying I haven't, but I don't ever want to vote for who doesn't take the value of human life, to be important, especially a child in the womb. But I, I know that some people will kind of hedge on this because it affects the voting in that particular.
Debbie Wuthnow And it all depends on the district they're in. Right. Because there, we've talked about redistricting and there are districts that are, you know, strongly Republican and strongly Democrat and if there's a Republican or then there's the toss ups. Right. That are more in the middle. So in, if there's somebody running in a, a toss up district that's, you know, really, they probably don't want to go on record as saying, I'm going to save every baby. because they wouldn't get those persuadable voters.
Rick Beggs Right.
Debbie Wuthnow Or it gets used against them in the general election for sure.
Rick Beggs So, yeah, it is. The whole thing is really a strategic game.
Debbie Wuthnow Politics. Yeah, it is.
Rick Beggs Yeah. Politics.
Debbie Wuthnow It's political because it is.
Rick Beggs Yeah.
We have questions about the economy on our questionnaire
So, we have questions about the economy.
Debbie Wuthnow Yes, we do on there.
Rick Beggs And do you have one in front of you that we have that's on the questionnaire?
Debbie Wuthnow So what actions would you take? So it's an open text question, really. Let them see what they would do. Would you take that would allow Americans to retain more of their income and wealth? So instead of specifically asking, do you want to balance the budget, do you want to decrease taxes, do you want to do whatever? And kind of guiding them, we're just like, lay it out there. What do you think we should do so that families. I mean, this is our affordability question, if you think about it. So that families get to retain more of the, you know, fruits of their labor.
Rick Beggs Well, it's interesting because, when you deal like things on the economy, you really have to be a wordsmith on how you put these questions out there because you can misread almost. It's sort of like, remember me talking
Debbie Wuthnow about those 20 hour meetings.
Rick Beggs Yeah.
Debbie Wuthnow So 22 hour meetings. We are wordsmithing. So we start by figuring out the topic and then we back and forth on, on the specific wording. specific words. Is it, you know, too general to, you know, does it guide or does it lead? Is it, in fact, sometimes questions, we'll call them double barreled questions. So we don't want to ask would you do this? And this. Because they might say no, meaning they won't do one of them, but they might do the other. And that's where that. Please explain. Puts. Kind of gets crazy.
ABCD questionnaire asks candidates about health care, education and immigration
Rick Beggs So, we have questions about health care.
Debbie Wuthnow Yes, we do.
Rick Beggs Which is very important in our country.
Debbie Wuthnow So that's that ABCD question.
Rick Beggs Yeah.
Debbie Wuthnow and so one of the options is, you know, healthcare for all. The Medicare. Medicare for all. One is, do you want health care to be funded, by the government? but we also want to allow private insurance to. Do you want Medicaid and Medicare to be available? But there is no other. I mean, it's just the government programs or that taxpayer funded health care should be abolished in all forms and Medicaid in America should be defunded. So this is. It's a spectrum in a way that the candidates get to give an answer, but also to qualify that answer.
Rick Beggs And of course a big hot topic a lot of times, especially in border states, even if you. I would think in Texas, Arizona, about immigration.
Debbie Wuthnow Yep.
Rick Beggs We'll have questions regarding that as well.
Debbie Wuthnow So we've asked, should the U.S. do more to secure the southern border? And we also ask under what, what who should be allowed to immigrate and under what circumstances.
Rick Beggs Yeah. So, education's another one. I mean, I can just keep going here, Debbie. I can just rattle.
Debbie Wuthnow It looks like you have the questionnaire
Rick Beggs in front of you. So what I, mean, education is huge and it differs from state to state. So talking about federal might be, do you want to abolish the Department of Education or in the state levels?
Debbie Wuthnow What do you want to do with it?
Rick Beggs What do you want to do with it?
Debbie Wuthnow Right. And so that's why at the federal level we do ask about school choice and that vouchers. But we also ask. I Support eliminating the U.S. department of Education and giving control back to the states and communities. So, you know, if we looked at our education questionnaire, which we can go into detail more, we have different questions, more about the curriculum and the safety of kids and things like that. But these are under the authority of the federal government.
Rick Beggs Yeah.
Debbie Wuthnow Should it be under the authority?
Rick Beggs Well, yes, that's right. values would seem to be a really important.
Debbie Wuthnow These are my tiebreaker questions specifically. So we ask about marriage. Do you believe God is marriage? Is God ordained? Sacred and legal union of a man and a woman. And government does not have the authority to change that. I do. But what does the candidate think? What do they think about children? Are they, says children are the most vulnerable members of society and must be protected from abuse, including gender ideology, grooming and bodily mutilation. We chewed on those words for a long time.
Rick Beggs Talk about wordsmithing. Just trying to figure out what resonates
Debbie Wuthnow and what is, what's problematic, what's truthful without being inflammatory.
Rick Beggs Yeah.
Debbie Wuthnow And what differentiates Republicans and Democrats as well. But my favorite tie breaker, I mean, so we also ask about gender transition and we came at it from the the money angle by asking taxpayer funds should be used to provide gender transition transition services. But then my favorite tie breaker question is describe your spiritual beliefs and values. Can, be revealing? You know, some candidates will say I grew up going to church or I'm
Rick Beggs a Catholic, I'm a born again Christian.
Debbie Wuthnow And we, that's my favorite answer. So, but it's a, it's a good differentiator now.
Rick Beggs I, I didn't, I don't remember. Is there a text box for that one? Oh, a big text box so people can write in a little more specifically.
Debbie Wuthnow Limit the text box size. But it's a pretty big limit because we don't want to read a white paper for every answer.
Rick Beggs That's right.
Debbie Wuthnow But yeah, some candidates will be very concise and some will tell us their whole life story. Yeah. Their testimony.
Rick Beggs You can tell who's run for office before and who hasn't. and then we talked a little bit about the about you section.
Debbie Wuthnow Yeah.
Rick Beggs and I, I just think that those are really eye opening and we've,
Debbie Wuthnow we've chewed on, you know, because we try to keep the questionnaire not too long. Do we really need to ask these questions? you know, have you been convicted of a felony? Have you ever been penalized for sexual misconduct in civil or criminal court? And so please explain, like, isn't that public record? But we feel like the candidate's going to go on record. This is something we need to, you know, say it is public record. Are you being truthful about it? Are you trying to hide something?
Rick Beggs Yeah. So we're aggregating all that information anyway. And like you said earlier in the broadcast, these are data points that will point back to what they've already done in office, how they voted, who gives to them, who they give to. Every one of these things fits in the puzzle so that you can Vote wisely and make a good decision.
Debbie Wuthnow Carefully designed, very prayerfully designed to illuminate the truth about each candidate and where they land on all the. All the issues important to us.
I think these school board races, I cannot tell you how important they are
Rick Beggs Now, we talked, I, think even last week that we really want to do a separate show regarding school board.
Debbie Wuthnow Yes.
Rick Beggs Questionnaires, judicial questionnaires, because they are uniquely different. And I think of the children aspect, of the education question. And now we talk about school board. Now this is work. Sort of the rubber hits the road.
Debbie Wuthnow Exactly.
Rick Beggs The sad thing is a lot of times this is where, in school boards in particular, this is where people cut their teeth to run for office later in life or later down the road if they do well at a school board.
Debbie Wuthnow The farm team.
Rick Beggs Yeah. The sad thing is this is the important team. I know I rant and raped about this many times, but I think these school board races, I cannot tell you how important.
Debbie Wuthnow Stay on your soapbox. It is so important.
Rick Beggs Yeah.
School board races are decided by so few people, uh, registered voters
And so let me get on another soapbox because it just came out. Well, it's this one. And that is. School board races are decided by so few people, who are actually registered voters. you show the, number being 6%, maybe 5 to 7 when
Debbie Wuthnow they're not on the ballot. With other things. Right. When it's a standalone election, the average is.
Rick Beggs It is just you're winning it by 3 percentage points plus one vote, which
Debbie Wuthnow in percentage points you can think, eh, it's not so bad. But, you know, we covered school board races. The ones we covered in 2024. It was almost 300 different races, school boards, across many states. The average winning margin was less than 900 votes. A third of the races, it was less than 400 votes. That was the difference between, you know, winning the seat and not winning the seat. And, you know, if it went to a runoff, it dropped 150 votes. It's what it took to run. So it really, your vote makes a difference.
Rick Beggs It saddens my heart because really that's two. Maybe one church, maybe a quarter of a megachurch. Yeah, yeah. I mean, it's tiny.
Debbie Wuthnow Tiny segment.
Rick Beggs Anyway, I, I think we are going to spend a little bit of time on.
Debbie Wuthnow As we should.
Rick Beggs Yeah. School board races. Anyway, you know what?
Debbie Wuthnow But you better come back. You want to hear.
Rick Beggs Well, you know what that sound is.
It's time, um, for election updates, especially during this primary season
It's time, for election updates, especially during this primary season.
Debbie Wuthnow This coming Tuesday, August 18th, is a big day for elections in Wyoming. Your primary election is here for special election in Senate District 6. Your polls open at 7am they close at 7pm In Pennsylvania, your general election for your House District 12 is here. Polls open at 7am, close at 8pm and Florida, your election that includes the school board candidates I Voter Guide is covering is is coming to on Tuesday. Polls open at 7am, close at 7pm Alaska, your polls open at 7am and close at 7pm and in Arkansas, you have a special primary election for SD1, and the polls open at 7:30am and close at 7:30pm not much going on in the early voting front. Rhode island, you have early voting that is underway for your election on, September 9th. And that's it for elections. Right?
Rick Beggs When are we done with the primary season?
Debbie Wuthnow the 15th of September is the final primary in Delaware. I just, I knew that off the top of my head.
Rick Beggs A month from now.
Debbie Wuthnow Yeah.
Rick Beggs Great. Well, listen, we are so grateful that you tuned in to listen to Debbie and I today on the Compass. the Compass is the official radio show of I Voter guide and I voterguide.com which is where you can find a lot of information if you want to learn how to vote wisely. We also need to let you know that we are a part of afa, American Family association and American Family Association Action, which is, where we find ourselves at iVoterGuide You can reach us at where, Debbie,
Debbie Wuthnow if you email compassivoterguide.com we have a team that will answer any questions that you have. And if you have something you want Rick and I to talk about on the air, please email us at [email protected] and we will address that in a future show.
Rick Beggs And many of you have asked, where could I find other broadcasts that you guys have done? Well, funny you should ask that question. You can find us at, ah, on the AFR app. You got to go download that. You can find not only our show, but so many other shows, placed by American Family Radio. Or you can go look us [email protected] and that is the official, radio website for AFR. We are grounded in God and rooted in research. Our producer is Brent Austin, and we're grateful he's always around. But at the Compass, we always want you to know that our true north will always be Jesus. And so that's why we base the show on. Thank you for joining us. Debbie will see you next week. Happy, birthday.
Debbie Wuthnow See you next week.
so that they could kind of walk through somebody, a candidate that they had in. In, on their ballot. So it allows them to kind of see what questions we're asking. And, and maybe we should talk a little bit about some of those, Debbie, because we did talk about what we used to ask. And then, four years come and go, two years, new things have become more important than they were two, four years ago. But there are some pretty stable questions that we have along the way.
There are several questions on abortion that are open to interpretation. Let's talk about some of those. Well, like, uh, there's a
Let's talk about some of those.
Debbie Wuthnow Well, like, there's a right to life question about.
Rick Beggs Seems like a good place to start.
Debbie Wuthnow There is, and it would be, do you want Planned Parenthood to be funded? So the actual wording is abortion providers, including Planned Parenthood, should not receive taxpayer funds from federal, state, or local governments.
Rick Beggs Yeah. So what it allows somebody to say is I agree or I disagree. but I know even in some of those, I have seen answers where they'll go, well, that's between A and B for me. And really the issue comes down to maybe the life of the mother. You know, in extreme cases, we
Debbie Wuthnow have a separate question that's an open text question.
Rick Beggs Right. And this is where they get to sort of.
Debbie Wuthnow Yeah.
Rick Beggs Make their decision.
Debbie Wuthnow And this one is, under what circumstances should an elective abortion be allowed? and, you know, we have guidance for the panelists on how do you, you know, what do you look for? We have abolitionists that, you know, every baby should be saved. And then there's others who, you know, for the life of the mother, it potentially could be allowed.
Rick Beggs Well, and what that allows is for somebody who believes this is a hotspot for them. And I look at the right for life one as well. It's very key for me. I don't ever want to vote for. I'm not saying I haven't, but I don't ever want to vote for who doesn't take the value of human life, to be important, especially a child in the womb. But I, I know that some people will kind of hedge on this because it affects the voting in that particular.
Debbie Wuthnow And it all depends on the district they're in. Right. Because there, we've talked about redistricting and there are districts that are, you know, strongly Republican and strongly Democrat and if there's a Republican or then there's the toss ups. Right. That are more in the middle. So in, if there's somebody running in a, a toss up district that's, you know, really, they probably don't want to go on record as saying, I'm going to save every baby. because they wouldn't get those persuadable voters.
Rick Beggs Right.
Debbie Wuthnow Or it gets used against them in the general election for sure.
Rick Beggs So, yeah, it is. The whole thing is really a strategic game.
Debbie Wuthnow Politics. Yeah, it is.
Rick Beggs Yeah. Politics.
Debbie Wuthnow It's political because it is.
Rick Beggs Yeah.
We have questions about the economy on our questionnaire
So, we have questions about the economy.
Debbie Wuthnow Yes, we do on there.
Rick Beggs And do you have one in front of you that we have that's on the questionnaire?
Debbie Wuthnow So what actions would you take? So it's an open text question, really. Let them see what they would do. Would you take that would allow Americans to retain more of their income and wealth? So instead of specifically asking, do you want to balance the budget, do you want to decrease taxes, do you want to do whatever? And kind of guiding them, we're just like, lay it out there. What do you think we should do so that families. I mean, this is our affordability question, if you think about it. So that families get to retain more of the, you know, fruits of their labor.
Rick Beggs Well, it's interesting because, when you deal like things on the economy, you really have to be a wordsmith on how you put these questions out there because you can misread almost. It's sort of like, remember me talking
Debbie Wuthnow about those 20 hour meetings.
Rick Beggs Yeah.
Debbie Wuthnow So 22 hour meetings. We are wordsmithing. So we start by figuring out the topic and then we back and forth on, on the specific wording. specific words. Is it, you know, too general to, you know, does it guide or does it lead? Is it, in fact, sometimes questions, we'll call them double barreled questions. So we don't want to ask would you do this? And this. Because they might say no, meaning they won't do one of them, but they might do the other. And that's where that. Please explain. Puts. Kind of gets crazy.
ABCD questionnaire asks candidates about health care, education and immigration
Rick Beggs So, we have questions about health care.
Debbie Wuthnow Yes, we do.
Rick Beggs Which is very important in our country.
Debbie Wuthnow So that's that ABCD question.
Rick Beggs Yeah.
Debbie Wuthnow and so one of the options is, you know, healthcare for all. The Medicare. Medicare for all. One is, do you want health care to be funded, by the government? but we also want to allow private insurance to. Do you want Medicaid and Medicare to be available? But there is no other. I mean, it's just the government programs or that taxpayer funded health care should be abolished in all forms and Medicaid in America should be defunded. So this is. It's a spectrum in a way that the candidates get to give an answer, but also to qualify that answer.
Rick Beggs And of course a big hot topic a lot of times, especially in border states, even if you. I would think in Texas, Arizona, about immigration.
Debbie Wuthnow Yep.
Rick Beggs We'll have questions regarding that as well.
Debbie Wuthnow So we've asked, should the U.S. do more to secure the southern border? And we also ask under what, what who should be allowed to immigrate and under what circumstances.
Rick Beggs Yeah. So, education's another one. I mean, I can just keep going here, Debbie. I can just rattle.
Debbie Wuthnow It looks like you have the questionnaire
Rick Beggs in front of you. So what I, mean, education is huge and it differs from state to state. So talking about federal might be, do you want to abolish the Department of Education or in the state levels?
Debbie Wuthnow What do you want to do with it?
Rick Beggs What do you want to do with it?
Debbie Wuthnow Right. And so that's why at the federal level we do ask about school choice and that vouchers. But we also ask. I Support eliminating the U.S. department of Education and giving control back to the states and communities. So, you know, if we looked at our education questionnaire, which we can go into detail more, we have different questions, more about the curriculum and the safety of kids and things like that. But these are under the authority of the federal government.
Rick Beggs Yeah.
Debbie Wuthnow Should it be under the authority?
Rick Beggs Well, yes, that's right. values would seem to be a really important.
Debbie Wuthnow These are my tiebreaker questions specifically. So we ask about marriage. Do you believe God is marriage? Is God ordained? Sacred and legal union of a man and a woman. And government does not have the authority to change that. I do. But what does the candidate think? What do they think about children? Are they, says children are the most vulnerable members of society and must be protected from abuse, including gender ideology, grooming and bodily mutilation. We chewed on those words for a long time.
Rick Beggs Talk about wordsmithing. Just trying to figure out what resonates
Debbie Wuthnow and what is, what's problematic, what's truthful without being inflammatory.
Rick Beggs Yeah.
Debbie Wuthnow And what differentiates Republicans and Democrats as well. But my favorite tie breaker, I mean, so we also ask about gender transition and we came at it from the the money angle by asking taxpayer funds should be used to provide gender transition transition services. But then my favorite tie breaker question is describe your spiritual beliefs and values. Can, be revealing? You know, some candidates will say I grew up going to church or I'm
Rick Beggs a Catholic, I'm a born again Christian.
Debbie Wuthnow And we, that's my favorite answer. So, but it's a, it's a good differentiator now.
Rick Beggs I, I didn't, I don't remember. Is there a text box for that one? Oh, a big text box so people can write in a little more specifically.
Debbie Wuthnow Limit the text box size. But it's a pretty big limit because we don't want to read a white paper for every answer.
Rick Beggs That's right.
Debbie Wuthnow But yeah, some candidates will be very concise and some will tell us their whole life story. Yeah. Their testimony.
Rick Beggs You can tell who's run for office before and who hasn't. and then we talked a little bit about the about you section.
Debbie Wuthnow Yeah.
Rick Beggs and I, I just think that those are really eye opening and we've,
Debbie Wuthnow we've chewed on, you know, because we try to keep the questionnaire not too long. Do we really need to ask these questions? you know, have you been convicted of a felony? Have you ever been penalized for sexual misconduct in civil or criminal court? And so please explain, like, isn't that public record? But we feel like the candidate's going to go on record. This is something we need to, you know, say it is public record. Are you being truthful about it? Are you trying to hide something?
Rick Beggs Yeah. So we're aggregating all that information anyway. And like you said earlier in the broadcast, these are data points that will point back to what they've already done in office, how they voted, who gives to them, who they give to. Every one of these things fits in the puzzle so that you can Vote wisely and make a good decision.
Debbie Wuthnow Carefully designed, very prayerfully designed to illuminate the truth about each candidate and where they land on all the. All the issues important to us.
I think these school board races, I cannot tell you how important they are
Rick Beggs Now, we talked, I, think even last week that we really want to do a separate show regarding school board.
Debbie Wuthnow Yes.
Rick Beggs Questionnaires, judicial questionnaires, because they are uniquely different. And I think of the children aspect, of the education question. And now we talk about school board. Now this is work. Sort of the rubber hits the road.
Debbie Wuthnow Exactly.
Rick Beggs The sad thing is a lot of times this is where, in school boards in particular, this is where people cut their teeth to run for office later in life or later down the road if they do well at a school board.
Debbie Wuthnow The farm team.
Rick Beggs Yeah. The sad thing is this is the important team. I know I rant and raped about this many times, but I think these school board races, I cannot tell you how important.
Debbie Wuthnow Stay on your soapbox. It is so important.
Rick Beggs Yeah.
School board races are decided by so few people, uh, registered voters
And so let me get on another soapbox because it just came out. Well, it's this one. And that is. School board races are decided by so few people, who are actually registered voters. you show the, number being 6%, maybe 5 to 7 when
Debbie Wuthnow they're not on the ballot. With other things. Right. When it's a standalone election, the average is.
Rick Beggs It is just you're winning it by 3 percentage points plus one vote, which
Debbie Wuthnow in percentage points you can think, eh, it's not so bad. But, you know, we covered school board races. The ones we covered in 2024. It was almost 300 different races, school boards, across many states. The average winning margin was less than 900 votes. A third of the races, it was less than 400 votes. That was the difference between, you know, winning the seat and not winning the seat. And, you know, if it went to a runoff, it dropped 150 votes. It's what it took to run. So it really, your vote makes a difference.
Rick Beggs It saddens my heart because really that's two. Maybe one church, maybe a quarter of a megachurch. Yeah, yeah. I mean, it's tiny.
Debbie Wuthnow Tiny segment.
Rick Beggs Anyway, I, I think we are going to spend a little bit of time on.
Debbie Wuthnow As we should.
Rick Beggs Yeah. School board races. Anyway, you know what?
Debbie Wuthnow But you better come back. You want to hear.
Rick Beggs Well, you know what that sound is.
It's time, um, for election updates, especially during this primary season
It's time, for election updates, especially during this primary season.
Debbie Wuthnow This coming Tuesday, August 18th, is a big day for elections in Wyoming. Your primary election is here for special election in Senate District 6. Your polls open at 7am they close at 7pm In Pennsylvania, your general election for your House District 12 is here. Polls open at 7am, close at 8pm and Florida, your election that includes the school board candidates I Voter Guide is covering is is coming to on Tuesday. Polls open at 7am, close at 7pm Alaska, your polls open at 7am and close at 7pm and in Arkansas, you have a special primary election for SD1, and the polls open at 7:30am and close at 7:30pm not much going on in the early voting front. Rhode island, you have early voting that is underway for your election on, September 9th. And that's it for elections. Right?
Rick Beggs When are we done with the primary season?
Debbie Wuthnow the 15th of September is the final primary in Delaware. I just, I knew that off the top of my head.
Rick Beggs A month from now.
Debbie Wuthnow Yeah.
Rick Beggs Great. Well, listen, we are so grateful that you tuned in to listen to Debbie and I today on the Compass. the Compass is the official radio show of I Voter guide and I voterguide.com which is where you can find a lot of information if you want to learn how to vote wisely. We also need to let you know that we are a part of afa, American Family association and American Family Association Action, which is, where we find ourselves at iVoterGuide You can reach us at where, Debbie,
Debbie Wuthnow if you email compassivoterguide.com we have a team that will answer any questions that you have. And if you have something you want Rick and I to talk about on the air, please email us at [email protected] and we will address that in a future show.
Rick Beggs And many of you have asked, where could I find other broadcasts that you guys have done? Well, funny you should ask that question. You can find us at, ah, on the AFR app. You got to go download that. You can find not only our show, but so many other shows, placed by American Family Radio. Or you can go look us [email protected] and that is the official, radio website for AFR. We are grounded in God and rooted in research. Our producer is Brent Austin, and we're grateful he's always around. But at the Compass, we always want you to know that our true north will always be Jesus. And so that's why we base the show on. Thank you for joining us. Debbie will see you next week. Happy, birthday.
Debbie Wuthnow See you next week.
Chapters:
(00:00) The Compass is the radio show. Navigating the public square together with faith, truth and conviction
(01:24) Debbie remembers having a birthday in the summer when there was no school
(02:09) We talk about iVoterGuide questionnaire and how voters should use it
(03:23) Candidates will complain our questionnaires are too long
(08:38) Panelists use questionnaire to help voters pick between candidates in primaries
(13:47) There are several questions on abortion that are open to interpretation. Let's talk about some of those. Well, like, uh, there's a
(16:12) We have questions about the economy on our questionnaire
(17:40) ABCD questionnaire asks candidates about health care, education and immigration
(22:34) I think these school board races, I cannot tell you how important they are
(23:29) School board races are decided by so few people, uh, registered voters
(24:52) It's time, um, for election updates, especially during this primary season
✍️ Episode References
iVoterGuide
https://ivoterguide.com
American Family Association
https://afa.net
AFR App
https://afr.net
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