As the 2024 election season gets underway, a new survey has a lot of bad news for the Democratic Party and its president, Joe Biden.
A majority of Americans place abortion and the environment well down their list of priorities, according to a new Newsweek tracking poll that the publication released this week.
The economy remains, by far, the most important issue, with 60% of respondents to the survey, which was conducted on 15 and 16 July among 1,500 eligible voters. This is at a time when petrol prices are rising again, food prices are high, interest rates have skyrocketed leading to significantly higher mortgage and auto loan costs, and an increasing number of Americans have seen their purchasing power decline under President Biden.
“The majority of voters, 48%, claimed they were in worse financial shape than they were three years earlier. According to Newsweek’s story, which included survey findings, “an additional 29% said they were better off and 22% said they were about the same.” “Compared to 28% who said their financial situation had improved and another 28% who said it had stayed the same, 44% reported that it had gotten worse in the past year.”
The top three concerns after that are likewise not always Democratic strongholds. The results of the survey showed that 33% of respondents ranked healthcare as the most significant issue, while 28% cited immigration as their main worry and 24% cited policing and crime.
Two crucial problems for Democrats, though, were further down the list.
According to a survey, “abortion and the environment were tied at 21 percent,” according to Newsweek.
The survey was conducted as part of a new collaboration with Newsweek by Redfield & Wilton Strategies, whose director of research, Philip van Scheltinga, noted that “the nuances of public opinion that we can already see in this first poll” also don’t always coincide with Democratic cultural and social priorities.
For instance, he noted, “62 percent of Americans say they are proud, as opposed to ashamed, of their nation’s history, and 70 percent think that students in schools ought to be encouraged to feel patriotic.”
“At the same time, 57% of respondents believe institutional racism is still a problem in the US. The public opinion environment is significantly more complex than the bipolar one we might be led to think it to be based on these statistics, the speaker continued.
According to him, “again indicating the public’s tendency not to perceive issues (in this case, LGBT issues) in the unified, box-like fashion that political activists may wish them to,” we see pluralities saying children should be taught about same-sex couples, but a majority saying children should not be taught that it is possible to change one’s gender.