Linking Politicians to Parties
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Is there any way, besides manually adding each politician to a party's "members" properties, to link a politician to a party? For instance, I have added a lot of campaigns. It should stand to reason that if a candidate runs as a Republican, that person has at some point been a Republican.
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It’s kind of a fuzzy question. In some states, anyone registered with a party can run as a candidate with that party, even if they aren’t properly a member or even completely misunderstand the party’s position (such as Ken Hamidi, a Libertarian candidate in the 2003 California gubernatorial recall, who registered Libertarian believing that to be a socialist party). In other states and in many countries, the party as a group chooses its candidates, and so they are necessarily affiliated. Cross-nomination also makes things weird; very few candidates of the Liberal or Conservative parties in New York state are members of those parties, for instance.
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To answer the more general question implied here: There isn't any way to auto-fill properties based the contents of other properties.
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Alright, well thanks. I just figured I'd ask because the party pages are pretty sparse despite the fact that many politicians are identified as members of the parties.
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We could do that; I had forgotten that it wasn't reciprocated. In fact, I'll go do that right now. But joguinn's question was about automatically using the party property on the election campaign type to auto-populate the party property on the politician type, which isn't possible.
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Thanks Jeff. I understand that joguinn was asking for something slightly different but I think that this might still reduce some of the manual labour associated with linking politicians to parties.
Right now, it looks like he's typing Republican Party as an Organization and adding Bob Barr to its members and then on Barr's page it shows that he's a member of an organization called the Republican Party but he also has to add the Republican Party to Bob Barr's party property as part of the Politician type.
Now that Political Party has a reverse link, all he needs to do is set Republican Party as Bob Barr's party and Barr will automatically appear on the Republican Party page as a Politician in this Party.
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Yeah, this is actually what I wanted, but didn't do a good job vocalizing. Oh well. The end result is a plus.
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