Hi Everyone,
Our recent, heated horse race debate seems to have annoyed one of our loyal fans. He is generally a nice enough guy - for a foreigner. Just kidding, some of my best friends are foreigners in one country or another. Well, his comments seem to be asking "who cares?" in response to the horse race debate. OK, in honor of the "Who Cares?" question here are some poll highlights from pollingreport.com about which issues people care about. Our foreign friend will find them interesting I hope if for no other reason than to give him a picture of American political culture.
OK here goes:
There are several polling companies asking about issue priorities but only FOX and CBS are post RNC.
There seems to be a consensus that biggest issue is jobs and the economy. Fox asked about jobs and got 23% saying it was their most important issue. CBS asked about the economy and got 30% saying it was most important. Survey says....#1 answer for both polls...."Good answer!"
There is a lot of variability on the terrorism issue depending on how the question is phrased. Fox asked about "terrorism and homeland security" and found that 22% of respondents ranked it as their most important issue. CBS asked about "terrorism (general)" and found that 8% of respondents ranked it as their most important issue.
There seems to be an interaction between how the terrorism questions are worded and the importance placed on Iraq. FOX got only 8% saying Iraq was the most important issue. But CBS got 15% saying that Iraq was the most important issue. I suspect that the "homeland security" terminology somehow gets people to bundle Iraq and terrorism in their heads. Or it could just be that FOX has a biased sample.
Both CBS and FOX asked about "healthcare/medicare" and got 13% and 12% respectively saying it was the top issue for them.
Foreign policy got roughly 8% in FOX and 5% in CBS.
Interestingly only FOX asked about gay marriage and only 4% said that it was their top priority for this election.
Both FOX and CBS asked about taxes and got 4% and 3% respectively saying taxes was their biggest concern.
Friday, September 10, 2004
Issue Salience
Posted by Raised By Republicans at 5:11 PM
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1 comment:
I wasn't so much saying "who cares" as I was saying "don't dress opinion as fact", and don't dress up baseless opinion as informed opinion. Then everyone will feel happier. Well, I will keep reading...
As an aside, so I don't appear like a total whinger, the Australian federal election will be held on the 9th of October: the Prime Minister called it a few weeks back. Election season in Australia, although we knew it was coming, only lasts 6 weeks. It will be interesting to see whether Howard gets extra support following the bombing of the Australian Embassy in Jakarta. I doubt that if Howard loses there would be any flow-on to W, even though the opposition leader has said he would withdraw troops from Iraq. That policy drew the wrath of one W official, who subsequently was told to mind his own business.
I'm hoping for a Labor party win. As they say in Australia: Tony Blair is so far up W's arse he can see the soles of John Howard's feet.
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