Lingle Dominating Hirono … in MTV ‘Fantasy Election’
Are you a big fantasy footballer who’s fed up with the replacement referees? Here’s an alternative: MTV’s Fantasy Election.
Just like in the football version, participants build a roster of candidates and are rewarded for those candidates on-the-campaign-trail successes. But rather than yards and touchdowns, the activities rewarded with fantasy points are truth-telling, transparency and civility. Candidates also get points for engaging with voters and for doing well in real-world opinion surveys. Here’s how it works.
MTV blasted out its “first quarter” stats Monday showing President Barack Obama as the highest-rated player in the country. Nipping at his heels was Hawaii Senate hopeful Linda Lingle.
As of this moment, Lingle’s racked up 8,191 total points, good enough for the fourth-highest score of more than 1,000 candidates nationwide.
More than half her tally comes from her transparency, as she’s gotten large weekly bonuses for maintaining a nearly perfect “disclosure rate” of 96 percent as reported by OpenSecrets.org. That number is a function of how often Lingle identifies donors’ occupations in her campaign finance filings without resorting to vague answers like “businessman,” “entrepreneur,” “self-employed,” and “executive.”
Lingle was also rewarded for frequently interacting via Facebook and Twitter.
Mazie Hirono had similar “engagement” bonuses, but was hurt by a much lower disclosure rate of 74 percent and a 1,040-point deduction for running “insubstantial” advertisements, per the Wesleyan Media Project. Hirono’s total score is 1,578.
Here’s how Hawaii’s major federal candidates stack up:
- Lingle — 8,191 points
- Tulsi Gabbard — 3,309
- Colleen Hanabusa — 3,117
- Hirono — 1,578
- Ed Case — 850
- Mufi Hannemann — -743
- Charles Djou — -4,886
As of this writing, Bob Marx ranks dead last in the entire nation, racking up an incredible -17,488 based mostly on a disclosure rate below 15 percent.
— Michael Levine
