How to Research Candidates

However, in the political campaigns you really should get the what, where and when first, and you can usually depend on Wikipedia for that much.  You can then determine the reasons why yourself with further research.  Political magazines generally have competent staff to provide commentary that can help you determine the why's and wherefore's.  They often have inside information and access to tables of data and polls not readily available to the public.

A particularly helpful feature of Wikipedia is that it is well organized.  Consider starting here https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_presidential_election,_2016.  Notice there are links for the candidates, debates, primaries and other useful information.  It also includes some information on third party candidates.

Wikipedia does not however venture to give the candidate's "official" campaign web site.  An effort to provide those is made here though in the following table.  This table does not include third party candidates.  Of course anyone can run for president as a write-in candidate.  Getting on the ballot can be difficult as there are several rules and requirements.  "Third" and other extra party candidates might not be on the ballot.  Researching those candidates will require a special effort.

The two major parties of course will eventually nominate one candidate each to be on the ballot.  The table lists the "official" domains of the campaign web sites of the people seeking those nominations.  Notice that there is no home page specified like "index.html" or "default.asp."  The various domain servers will pick a page for you, sometimes based on the language they think you speak.  It might be a page that asks for donations first.  Once you are in the domain you can retry getting a "home" page by editing the address in your browser's address bar and might get a different result than from outside the domain.