Voters Say Economy, Supreme Court, Are Top Campaign Issues

Despite the world’s string of high-profile terror attacks this year, the economy remains at the top of American voters’ minds, a new HuffPost/YouGov survey finds. A 45 percent plurality name the economy as one of the two issues most important to them, ranking it first on a list of 10 topics.

Economic concerns nearly always come out on top of such surveys. Notably, however, the future of the Supreme Court ranks second on the list. Thirty percent of voters cite choosing which party will get to nominate Supreme Court justices as a top concern, placing it ahead of health care, immigration and foreign policy. That’s a dramatic uptick since February, when the Supreme Court issue ranked dead -last among Americans.

While Democrats, Republicans and independents all cite the economy as their biggest priority, the list diverges somewhat from there. Democrats and independents’ second- and third-biggest concerns are health care and the Supreme Court, while Republicans name immigration and the Supreme Court.

Voters say by a 16-point margin 48 percent to 32 percent that they expect domestic policy to play a larger role than foreign policy in this election. By a 43-point margin 65 percent to 22 percent they say domestic issues are more important to them personally.

That’s despite a growing consensus that terrorism, rather than the economy, is worsening. Sixty-six percent of voters say that the threat of terrorism has increased over the past year, while just 36 percent believe that the state of the economy has worsened.

Democrats largely believe the economy has improved (37 percent) or stayed the same (40 percent), while a 57 percent majority of Republicans think it’s gotten worse. A majority in both parties, however, agrees that terrorism has worsened. 

The HuffPost/YouGov poll consisted of 1,000 completed interviews conducted Aug. 4 to Aug. 7 among U.S. adults, using a sample selected from YouGov’s opt-in online panel to match the demographics and other characteristics of the adult U.S. population.

The Huffington Post has teamed up with YouGov to conduct daily opinion polls.You can learn more  about this project and take part  in YouGov’s nationally representative opinion polling. Data from all HuffPost/YouGov polls can be found here . More details on the polls’ methodology are available here .

Most surveys report a margin of error that represents some, but not all, potential survey errors. YouGov’s reports include a model-based margin of error, which rests on a specific set of statistical assumptions about the selected sample, rather than the standard methodology for random probability sampling. If these assumptions are wrong, the model-based margin of error may also be inaccurate. Click here  for a more detailed explanation of the model-based margin of error.