Issue Importance in the 2020 Presidential Election
Over the last nine months, we have collected data from social and news media, public opinion polls, debates, and campaign speeches and advertisements. Many of our earlier analyses focused on the battle for the Democratic nomination. Now, with just six weeks to go until Nov. 3, we are analyzing these data to unpack the issue landscape and campaign dynamics in the presidential election. In the weeks to come we will:
trace the election-related issues and events garnering attention on social media;
track candidates’ campaign messaging over the course of their campaigns;
examine media coverage of the elections; and
survey Americans about their issue priorities and reactions to the 2020 campaigns.
We begin with an update to our Issue Tracker, first introduced during the Democratic primary elections. Our team collected tweets mentioning Biden or Trump, or that used hashtags to the 2020 presidential election between July 31st and September 9th. We then classified tweets by issue. Approximately 11% of the roughly 47 million tweets we collected mentioned at least one of our tracked issues (see methodology note below).
COVID-19 and the economy were the most referenced issues throughout this time period. There was some uptick in tweets referencing climate change, LGBTQ rights, and immigration during the DNC, and a slight uptick in tweets about crime during the RNC.
But it was reaction to two recent events that generated the largest swings in our issue tracker. The first is to the police shooting of Jacob Blake in Kenosha, Wisconsin on August 23rd. Calls for racial justice once again dominated social media, as protests erupted in Kenosha and beyond. As first Trump and then Biden traveled to Wisconsin, we see the dueling campaign narratives reflected on Twitter, with increased focus on racial injustice and, to a lesser extent, crime. However, attention to “law and order," which has become one of the Trump campaign’s signature issues, quickly subsided following reports, first published in the Atlantic and then confirmed in part by a Fox News journalist, that President Trump had allegedly disparaged military members who died in war.
We will be updating our Issue Tracker weekly to assess which issues are sticking, and which are rising and falling with news cycle. Already we are seeing that the renewed attention to racial justice, sparked by George Floyd’s death and the mass protests that followed, has not subsided, and has joined the economy and COVID-19 as the top issues dominating election-related discourse on social media.
We will also be reporting results from our nationally representative public opinion surveys, assessing voters’ issue priorities and their reactions to events as the campaigns unfold, and whether the issues garnering the most attention on social media are also resonating with the broader electorate. In an earlier analysis, we noted few differences in issue importance between Twitter users and those not on the social media platform.
In this first survey, we asked respondents to name the issue that is most important to them in the presidential election. We then coded these open-ended responses. The economy topped the list, with nearly 1 in 5 respondents naming it as their most important issue. Pres. Trump came in at number two, with 17 percent of respondents either identifying his re-election or defeat as the most important issue at stake in November. Concerns about leadership (16 percent) and COVID-19 (13 percent) rounded out the top issues our respondents identified in their open-ended responses. Other issues that were referenced relatively frequently included healthcare (6 percent), civil rights and discrimination (6 percent), and concerns about election integrity and safety (5 percent). Only two respondents named the Supreme Court as their top issue. Poverty was mentioned just once.
We also gave respondents a randomized list of 20 issues and asked them to assess the importance of each. The figure below shows how self-identified Republicans and Democrats evaluated the importance of these issues. Democrats overwhelmingly identified COVID-19 as a very important issue. Republicans, however, were over 40 percentage points less likely than Democrats to say that the coronavirus outbreak is very important to the presidential election. In contrast, there was little difference in how Democrats and Republicans identified the importance of the economy. Likewise, there were few partisan gaps in issue importance regarding the Supreme Court, abortion, or Social Security.
In our next survey, we will revisit many of these issues. Our first survey, for example, was conducted weeks before the police shooting of Jacob Blake. Do we observe change or continuity in these issue priorities? What issues are Americans reporting that they are not hearing enough about from the presidential candidates. We will turn to these question with the release of our next survey in late September.
About our methodology.
We use the platform Brand Watch (BW) to collect our data from several online sources, although for our Issue tracker we focus on Twitter. Our query included a combination of keywords consisting of the candidates’ names (e.g., Joe Biden), short forms of the names (e.g., Biden or Trump) and the candidates’ Twitter handles (e.g., @realDonaldTrump). The query also included several election-related hashtags (e.g., #2020Election). We then classified the search results into each of 23 issues using a dictionary of words that are most likely to occur in the context of each issue. We identified keywords through initial topic modeling of candidates’ tweets and open-ended survey responses and an examination of other issue classification schemas, such as the Comparative Agendas Project and Gallup’s “Most Important Problem” poll series. For example, a tweet was assigned to the Climate change issue if it included words or phrases like “climate,” “global warming,” “green new deal,” or “energy policy.” If, on the other hand, the tweet included words like “defense,” “national security,” or “troops,” it was assigned to the Defense and foreign policy category. A single tweet could be classified as more than one issue if it used keywords from multiple issues. The alphabetized list of 23 issues is below. We will be updating this list as needed in the future.
Healthcare
Housing
Immigration
LGBTQ rights
Poverty
Racial justice
Religious liberty
Social Security
Supreme Court
Taxes
Trade
Abortion
Agriculture
Campaign and election reform
Climate change
COVID-19
Crime and law and order
Defense and foreign policy
Democracy
Economic inequality
Economy
Federal budget deficit
Gender equality