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After the kids went to bed last night, I spent a little time watching one of the Republican Presidential Nomination debates on CNN with questions from youtuber’s. I flipped for about half an hour between CNN and MSNBC I think. I can’t remember which channel it was, but it had the coolest thing.

While the candidate was responding, the audience held some device and they could press a button if they agreed, or disagreed with what the candidate was saying. They had it separated by male and female, a chart then had a scale from 1 to 10 with 10 being agree, 1 being strongly disagree. The two bars (male and female) would slide up to about 6 or 8, then fall to 3 or 2 while various answers were being given.

This screen was overlayed on top of the visual of the candidate talking. The audience reaction would a lag a bit behind the speaker but you could keep up easily with a comment and five seconds later see the reaction.

I loved this! It was interesting how some candidates would not have a real answer to the question and the audience perception would slowly decline and then rapidly fall. But if the candidate had enough time to throw in some banter about patriotism, not matter how unrelated to the question, the chart lines would start climbing up again.

Mike Huckabee consistently had good lines. He got a burst of 9’s when he said that we should keep funding space exploration so that Hilary could be the first one to Mars. Why do the candidates do that? It doesn’t really say anything negative about the opponent, but rather themselves. sigh.

I think they should use the charts for every debate. Then maybe the candidates would get a feel for what America wants to hear from them, what issues are important, and what their appropriate response is. I’m sure that someone from their campaign headquarters is taking notes, I just hope they use them.

It’d be lovely to use this same ‘guaging reaction’ device after elected like during the yearly ‘State of the Union’, or even during every day press conferences. There is a danger in the person catering to the audience rather than speaking the truth, but still.

Wait! Brilliant! Let’s hook em up to a lie detector, someone interprets with thumbs up and thumbs down, and then overlay the people’s reaction on top of that! In real time!

It’ll never happen but it’s nice to dream. Did you see the debate using this device? Did you like it? Would you like to see more politicians tell it to us straight and like it really is?