A Candidate Questionnaire

When American political candidates run for office, they get inundated (so I understand) with Candidate Questionnaires from various interest groups sounding out their soundness on that group's key issues. So the questionnaire will ask whether the candidate supports or opposes [gun/abortion/upzoning] rights, and the candidates will answer, and the groups will give money to the candidates whose answers they like, or announce to the world that Jo Bloggs scored 94% and is rated A+ by Americans For This Issue.

I am not in a position to do this myself, but it might be nice if someone sent round a questionnaire asking candidates about some basic personal history questions. "Have you ever had sex with someone on your payroll?" seems like a good start; "Have you ever, as an adult, had a relationship with someone under 18?", similarly.

I think it should be possible to come up with 5-10 questions which are concrete, objective, and apolitical, and which could nicely get around the cycle of
"politician gets nominated by a party" --> "stuff comes out about their personal history" --> "politician's team insists that The American People don't care about X/Y/Z" --> "party's voters are pressured to go along with that, because at this point their choices are pretend to be ok with this thing or let The Other Team win the election," even though they would have rather picked another candidate for their team if they'd known the information sooner.

The questionnaire would get around that cycle by forcing the information out in the open earlier in the election cycle, while voters still have other choices.

The whole thing only works if enough politicians sign on to it that not-signing gets to be seen as a bad sign. How hard is it to get over the hill of the social behaviour curve? I'm not sure – in my head it feels like it should be possible to find a race where a few of the politicians are willing to do it, and then build up from there. In theory, any politician who has never done [bad things] should be happy to answer the survey. But maybe they'll figure that it sets a bad precedent and lead to more questionnaires with harder questions in future, or maybe their worse-behaving colleagues will pressure them not to answer the questionnaire so that it doesn't become normalized, I don't know.

Perhaps you could combine all this with an investigative reporting arm that credibly claims to investigate the highest-polling candidate who has not yet answered the questionnaire at any given time, though that's the kind of idea that seems to only happen in fiction and never in fact.

Presumably there's a reason that things like this don't happen, presumably the incentives don't line up. But hey, it's an idea.

This post was pre-scheduled. If something has just happened in the last few days, it is not specifically about that something – sadly this post seems to be evergreen.