Issues
I would be remiss if I did not send out a big thank you to Hunter Bacot, director of the Elon Poll. I asked a question that the data they had for release didn’t answer and he went back and ran a cross tab for me this afternoon to help me out.
So I’ll share it with y’all as something to chew on over the weekend.
Basically, I wanted to know if some issues were resonating more with voters of particular affiliations or independents more than others.
So for example, 75.2 percent of all respondents (all from North Carolina) said immigration would be an issue that would guide their choice in the fall election.
If you take that a step further, you find that 82.3 percent of Republicans say the immigration issue will help swing their vote while only 70.3 percent of Democrats say that. Does that mean Democratic voters don’t care about immigration? No. It means Republican voters care more about it.
Click here to see the Elon Poll’s issue question data broken out by party affiliation.
So in an election where turning out core voters will be key, you can well expect to hear about immigration from Republicans more than Democrats.
Independent voters, as you might expect, fall smack dab between the two parties on the immigration question.
I was interested also in independent voters generally. If you figure folks who don’t affiliate with either party are pretty much swing voters, then folks in both parties should be curious as to what issues capture the imagine of independents.
Unfortunately for political advisors and annalists, this poll shows no one issue you can point to and say “Aha, independent voters cares about X much more than anything else. Campaign on that to capture them.”
What did intrigue me a bit was that independent voters were just as likely say that political corruption would influence their votes as Republicans or Democrats. This had been an issue I expected to be highly partisan in nature, with independents tuning out.
If you take as reliable the notion that Republicans are most fired up about the ethics issues regarding Democratic state House Speaker Jim Black; and Democrats would be most angry about the Republican scandals in Washington, what do you make of the independents?
Could the elections this fall swing on which scandals more incense independent voters?
That may be a question no poll can answer.
More on the poll will be in tomorrow’s paper.
Comments (2)
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Mark:
Interesting analysis. Yep, I guess we'll have to get used to lots of immigration ads during campaign season.
One thing I would caution, however, is not to conflate independents and swing voters. The latter is a subset of the former. Lots of people registered as independents are really fairly loyal Republicans (in suburbs or rural areas) or Democrats (in urban cores). I think a useful way to burrow down to the true swings is to ask whether, regardless of party affiliation, respondents typically vote more R than D or more D than R. Those who say neither are true swings.
Posted on October 1, 2006 7:28 AM
Good thought on the independents vs. unaffiliated voters. The poll data doesn't give us a way to parce that out. Maybe you can suggest it as a question.
As for more ads, my friends in Ohio tell me that couch jockies there are really getting an eye-full from political types.
Posted on October 1, 2006 8:32 AM