Who is your 2012 GOP candidate?

There are many ways to analyze GOP candidates to see where they stand on various issues. I have found a matrix ready for analysis at http://psudo.us/sho/GOP.html. And that is what I am going to use. 

Notice a large proportion of data is missing. 

Unlike some other multivariate methods, Nonmetric Multidimensional Scaling (MDS) is able to handle missing data. MDS "fits" the high dimensional data into a lower dimensional space by preserving the relative distances between data points as much as possible. When used properly, it is a great visualization tool. 

One way to validate if the dimension reduction is reasonable is to check with the badness-of-fit. The results show all fits have a badness-of-fit value less than 0.1, which is excellent.


Below is a matrix of scatter plots using MDS outputs. There are five categories of issues or policies and 5 scatter plots. The first plot is the overall stance. You can now identify who's who from the plots. Enjoy!