Results of the TYWKIWDBI presidential preference poll

Two weeks ago I invited readers of this blog to indicate their preference for the next president of the United States via a poll in the right sidebar.  Voting is now closed, so I'll remove the poll soon so that it doesn't distract from the useful items in that sidebar, but I'll transcribe the final results here for future reference.  1,365 readers participated:

Bernie Sanders               637 (46%)
Hillary Clinton               276 (20%)
Republican candidates   255 (19%)
"None of the above"      164 (12%)
Other Democrats             33 (  2%)

The Republican candidates ranked as follows:

Rand Paul 52
Scott Walker 37
Donald Trump 30
Jeb Bush 24
Ben Carson 21
Ted Cruz 19
Marco Rubio 13
Carly Fiorina 12
Chris Christie 11
John Kasich 10
Bobby Jindal 9
Mike Huckabee 8
Rick Perry 5
George Pataki 2
Lindsey Graham 2
Rick Santorum 2

I'll preface my comments with the disclaimer that this poll was in no way scientific or predictive.  I did this as a way to get a broad view of the readership of this blog, and in part to help guide me in my blogging for the next 16 months.

The ranking of the Republican candidates seems to be reflective of their favorability and popularity in the country as a whole.  The group at the top and the group at the bottom match up pretty well with what I see in national media and hear from my Republican friends.  Donald Trump's position at #3 might be real, but I suspect there may have been some trolling by readers who otherwise would have selected "none of the above."

The biggest surprise of the entire venture was of course the extremely strong showing by Bernie Sanders.  His strength was evident even within a few hours of the start of the poll, and remained unchanged for the following two weeks.  That might mean that there are a lot of liberal/progressive readers of this blog - or that liberal/progressive readers tend to participate more actively in online polls.  My own view is that the voting reflects the international distribution of TYWKIWDBI visitors, with Canadian, U.K., and European readers taking advantage of an opportunity to chime in on the topic of U.S. politics.

So how does this inform future posts on this blog?  I obviously don't write to please an audience; this is a noncommercial blog written for my own enjoyment, and I view readers as welcome visitors peeking over my shoulder.  Numerous comments appended to the poll reinforce my own view that I want to keep politics to a minimum here for the coming year.  I will take advantage of opportunities to post humorous or frankly WTF events from the campaigns, but for the most part there's no advantage in spending time writing up events until at least after the initial primaries winnow down the field and highlight the platforms of the parties.

The exception to this plan is that I obviously need to pay some attention to Bernie Sanders and this "revolution," which reminds me of the populist appeal Ron Paul exerted some years ago and which I featured at that time.  I need to read and post about socialism, social democracies, and populist movements.  But I'll try to keep all this to a minimum that can be zoomed past with a flick of the mouse.