The 2016 elections cycle has already been quite a ride. If you’ve tuned in to the twists and turns of the debates, the issues and candidate drama, you know it can be challenging to follow along.

To give you clarity and insight for a better understanding of the presidential race, the Bing team has created a simple but powerful view of the candidates. When you search on election topics, you’ll see in-depth candidate pages coupled with a unique tool called the Bing Political Index. This is the first of several 2016 election experiences we plan to bring you this year. Try it here: www.bing.com/elections.

The Bing Political Index

The Bing Political Index (BPI) shows where each candidate stands on an issue, and the corresponding public opinion on that issue. It’s designed to help you understand the candidates and the contest through the issues you care about.

The BPI was built by the Bing Predicts team by crunching terabytes of search and social data, together with expert candidate analysis from Ontheissues.org, through machine learning models. BPI assigns a candidate score and a public score for ten of the key issues that shape the 2016 election cycle: education, environmental issues, tax reform, abortion, gun control, immigration reform, drug policy, LGBT rights, healthcare and Social Security.

Both the candidate and public scores are dynamic—as each candidate’s campaign unfolds, and as public conversations heat up, the BPI will be updated on a monthly basis to reflect those shifts and incorporate issues as they arise.

Candidates

To dig deeper into a candidate’s positions, hover over each candidate’s issues page to see his or her candidate score across the ten issues. You can also compare two candidates’ BPI scores at the same time.

If you want to see which candidate you are most aligned to, you can take the My BPI survey, developed by Ontheissues.org, to see approximately where your position on the issues falls in the Bing Political Index and compare it to each candidate, using the same set of criteria as the candidate and public scores. The survey is a good starting point for your deeper elections research into the issues you care about most.

We also include search and social data as part of their candidate section to give you a look at the social-media buzz and interest for each candidate over time.

Within the candidates section, you can also find more background on a candidate, explore events in a candidate’s political life and to see an overview of campaign and professional info.

Timeline

To figure out when a debate or primary will be held, our election timeline includes past general election milestones and provides a calendar of future election events.

Stay tuned through this election cycle as the road to Election Day heats up and the candidate field narrows. We will bring you even more new tools and insights to help you participate and make your vote count.

Try it out today at www.bing.com/elections and let us know what you think!

– Ryan Gavin, General Manager of Search