Voters are more concerned about the economy than anything

And their concern about the economy is more *intense* than it is about anything else.

Some unusual data analysis this morning that I thought I’d share: periodically, The Economist asks respondents to answer two sets of questions about various issues facing the American public. First, it asks them to say whether they think each of these issues is very important, somewhat important, not very important, or unimportant. This question gives us information about how intensely people find an issue, because they aren’t just saying whether it’s important or unimportant - they’re responding with terms like “very” or “somewhat.”

Based on the answers they give I can do a little math and calculate a Likert score for each issue, which tells us how intensely people tend to feel about these issues on a scale of 0 (very unimportant) to 4 (very important).

Then, The Economist asks respondents to say which of these issues they consider the most important, and it reports back the percentage of responses that each issue gets. I’ve plotted that on the horizontal axis.

What we have, then, is a chart that compares how intensely people feel about a given issue to how they rank it in importance against other issues. Above the red trendline are issues that people feel are more important than their ranking might suggest; below it are issues that people feel are less important than their ranking might suggest. Some takeaways:

1. People are way less concerned about the environment and abortion than their rank against other issues would suggest.

2. That civil rights and civil liberties score so closely to each other (their dots almost completely overlap) suggests that people probably aren’t distinguishing them from each other.

3. Despite predictions that Ukraine and Palestine would be deciding issues in this election, people really aren’t all that worried about either.

4. As usual, prices, jobs, healthcare, and immigration — in other words, economic issues — rank at the top of everyone’s concerns.

No dramatic or unexpected takeaways here, but when reading polls it’s always a good idea to remember the difference between the importance respondents attach to issues and their comparative ranking against other issues. These may seem like similar measures, but some issues have small but very intense support, while other issues may top voter concerns in a way that belies how strongly voters feel about them. These differences can become particularly important in elections, because a small group of enthusiastic activists can often have a bigger impact than a large group that is relatively unmotivated.