What Issues Are People Actually Talking About In The Swing States?
The top issue that benefits Democrats isn't what most pundits think.
Now that the nominations have been clinched, the focus of the political class begins to turn to those lucky citizens whom mere fortune has placed on the right side of imaginary lines drawn before the invention of the tin can.
Swing state voters, the fate of our 248-year experiment in representative democracy is entirely in your hands! You, who reside in states that, in 2020, decided the election by margins of 3 points or less - namely, Wisconsin, Georgia, Michigan, North Carolina, Arizona, Nevada, and Pennsylvania.
What are the top issues?
To build this query, Share Of Voice used a several parameters:
self-identified partisans are excluded (people who put partisan signifiers in their bios, like #MAGA, #Resist, Democrat, Republican, liberal, conservative, etc. etc. The list is long and comprehensive, and scoops up a virtually equal number of online partisans on either side nationally)
accounts with more than 2,000 followers are excluded in order to filter out professional content creators, influencers, political figures, news organizations, and other institutional voices that seek to persuade, and tend to post much more often than everyone else, which can skew the data
the most damaging personal attribute of each presidential candidate was included, regardless of the size of conversation since Presidential campaigns, for better or worse, often turn on personal baggage that voters consider when evaluating the candidates
Looking at a number of different issues and topics, there were several that rose above all the rest. Here is a chart showing the growth of the most-discussed political topics over the past 6 months (and the two most-discussed personal baggage issues for each Presidential candidate):
The four most-discussed political issues over the past 6 months, measured by number of posts about each topic from residents of the Swingy Seven:
Border Issues/Immigration (1.75 million posts) (query terms include derogatory words like “illegals” as well as more neutral terms like “border security” or just plain “immigration,” as well as the word “border/s” used in close proximity with a number of other terms, including “open,” “Biden” and “Democrats”)
Democracy vs. Fascism/Extremism (1.15 million posts) (query terms were limited to the words democracy, fascism, authoritarianism, extremism, and variants of those words - more specific references to groups like communists, Marxists, Nazis, and the MAGA movement were not included).
The Economy/Cost Of Living (726K posts) (query terms include straightforward references to the U.S. economy and inflation, but also cost-related words like “afford” used in close proximity with common purchases like groceries, housing, health care, child care, prescriptions, gas, etc.)
Abortion (725K posts) (query includes terms related to reproductive health care and reproductive rights, terms like pro-life, unborn (and the newly-fashionable term on the right, “pre-born”) and also IVF bans, references to Dobbs, Roe v. Wade, and specific individuals like Kate Cox, etc.)
…and the two “personal baggage” issues that rose to the top were:
Trump’s legal issues (727K posts) (query terms include references to indictments, trials, and criminal allegations, but do not include references to personalities like Jack Smith, Fani Willis, etc.)
Biden’s age (121K posts) (query terms include derogatory words like “geezer” and “ancient” and unfounded references to things like dementia, as well as words like “age” and “old”)
And here are visualizations of each topic broken out by age group:
Here they are in pie chart form, with issues that favor the GOP shaded more in red, and issues that favor the Democrats shaded more in blue:
Several things strike me as unexpected here, at least based on what most of the political class thinks is important to voters.
First, the prominence of Democracy vs. Fascism - it’s the number two issue overall after the border. I know, I know, no one cares about democracy, they care about the price of eggs. Except they do care about democracy. Even in the 2022 midterm elections, a VoteCast survey of 92,000 voters showed it to be the top issue for 44% of Election Day voters, second only to inflation.
And now, they care about it a whole lot, even in the swing states. Even more than inflation. Even people who are not influencers and journalists and professional activists. Normal people. And if the query included terms like “MAGA” and references to Trump’s “dictator on Day One” quotes, the total number of posts would be much bigger. Even when we’re just using terms that used to be confined to poli sci undergrad—democracy, fascism, authoritarianism, and extremism—the conversation is quite a bit larger than the one about, say, crime (which didn’t break through among the most-mentioned issues).
Second - one of the GOP’s main issues may not be an issue at all by November - namely, the economy. This week, the Fed finally signaled that it would cut interest rates this year, sending the stock market on a buying spree and potentially unlocking the stubborn housing market, which has been the last piece holding back the overall economy. The economy could very well turn out to be a Biden issue (and he’s betting that it will be).
Further, the economy appears to be the issue that’s giving the GOP & Trump some traction among younger voters (a poll finding supported by the age breakdown above), and that traction could very well be fleeting. Once those voters feel more economically secure, they are much more likely to come home to the D column (which they overwhelmingly voted for in huge numbers in 2022).
Third, Trump’s personal baggage issue (his legal problems) gets mentioned much more than Biden’s (his age), and that narrative about Trump’s indictments could very well balloon into the main issue of the campaign as his impending trials go forward. Due to the inevitable increase in campaign messaging from Biden et al. highlighting the allegations against Trump, this topic isn’t going anywhere, even if trials do not conclude before Election Day.
But the border…
The border is indeed a political problem for Biden and Democrats. And it isn’t just confined to border states, since migrants are being bused to different parts of the country and overwhelming the social resources available in those areas, creating visible problems like homelessness that take the issue beyond the abstract for many swing state voters. (The border was the top issue mentioned in every swing state, not just those in the Southwest like Arizona and Nevada.)
I unfortunately have no power to predict the salience of this issue through November, which is a long way off. (Though way back in early January, this newsletter identified the border as the likely central campaign message of Trump and the GOP based on online conversation trends.)
I also don’t know how effective it will be for Biden and Democrats to campaign as the true border security hawks due to baked-in notions about the two parties (though it appeared to be a factor in Tom Suozzi’s special election win, and a Wisconsin focus group blamed Republicans and Trump for the failure of the bill…though those Wisconsinites had just watched a three-minute excerpt from Biden’s State Of The Union, so they were not exactly representative of the average swing state voter going into a voting booth in November).
I think it’s possible that Biden’s highly resonant message about Trump only caring about himself might be the best way to somewhat neutralize the issue if Trump’s killing of the bill is emphasized, though I’m skeptical that voters who view the border as their top issue will shift to Biden in significant numbers. I’m a much bigger fan of pivoting the conversation to friendlier territory - namely, protecting democracy and freedom (including abortion rights first and foremost), and highlighting Trump’s unfitness for office and his disastrous performance as President during the global Covid crisis (the Biden team just released a strong ad on this front). And, hopefully the strengthening economy will be Biden’s ace in the hole.
We’ll keep checking in on swing states periodically to see how these conversations are evolving is November approaches. But Democrats have strong support for the issues that they’re fighting for, and the GOP and Trump are almost certainly going to double down on ugly rhetoric about immigrants as the economy continues to improve, which may strengthen Biden’s argument about extremism and democracy.
The entire election could boil down to one question: are swing state voters more afraid of migrants, or of Trump?