There are well-crafted explainers to the 2020 election that you can read on fine websites like Vox and FiveThirtyEight, and smart essays about candidates and policy specifics you can read on Slate and The Outline, and illuminating, gossipy profiles you’ll read in Vanity Fair and The New Yorker, and infuriating horse race minutiae you’ll find in Politico and Axios, and for the most part all of this is good for making you the most well-informed person at the dinner table, someone who can lecture with depth and nuance about the relevant issues and considerations that will only multiply and complicate as we trudge along the very long path to Election Day.

This is not a post for that, however, but a simple explainer to the more pressing question for the dumbasses in the room: Are they more like Obama, Hillary, Bernie, or Trump? (Don’t second-guess the elegance of the sorting categories.) As such, we’ve made a shorthand compass as a handy reference point. Please direct all complaints to josh@theoutline.com.