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Nobody Cares about Climate Change. (And Few Care about the Economy, Either.)
I found these polls at Gallup today, which I find rather interesting. First, the issues that are on voters’ minds this election. The top issue is unsurprising. What’s at the bottom? Climate Change at a tiny 3 percent. Nobody cares. What issue is always present in these debates? Climate Change.
Nobody cares. Stop treating it like it’s a major issue.
But look at the bottom row. “Net economic problems” (meaning that those who responded chose at least one economic issue as important to them): 14 percent. This tells me that the economy in general is not a major concern this year. In spite of the lockdowns and job losses.
Gallup also compared this year to previous years where an incumbent was running. Look at 2012 when Obama was begging for a second term. That year, 72 percent of Americans chose an economic issue as being the most important problem. A record high.
This year, almost tied with the record low back in 1964.
While focusing on the economy is always important, it seems that people just aren’t that concerned about it this year. People say they’re better off than they were four years ago. In spite of the lockdowns, the job losses, the business closings.
I admit to a little surprise. What does this tell you? That people recognize that the President has done a fantastic job on the economy in spite of the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune known as the Bat Soup Flu? And they haven’t lost hope that things will improve once we’re shut of the damn thing?
Published in Elections
Voters’ top issue falls primarily under state and local jurisdiction.
It’s frustrating how often this happens.
It’s possible that people who said “coronavirus” meant “everything that coronavirus has inflicted on us, including (but not limited to) economic troubles.”
I believe the response to the Wuhan Coronavirus has definitely helped remind people how important local elections are. In our fairly Blue City, our City Council’s plan to grant way too much power to the local (unelected) head of the health department resulted in several protests. I have a feeling that the next City Council elections will not go well for the incumbents. (I hope! I hope!)
Cal Thomas had a column before the debate comparing what is important to voters vs. what the debate commission chooses to focus on. He used a PEW poll which had different result than Gallup, but on both climate change is way down on the list.
That Pew poll is really different. Makes me wonder how questions were worded.
Fear is contagious. The ascendancy of well-off frightened Americans is bizarre. We are a soft nation standing on the shoulders of giants and seeing a sniffle in every direction.
Is there an age breakdown among the respondents to the questions?
I’d guarantee that all of these climate change hysterics are godless. They’re pagan Gaea worshippers. You can’t remove religion, it just gets replaced with something else.
In the modern age, it gets replaced with Wokeism.
I’m surprised “crime/violence” is so low. I would have thought the riots in Seattle and Portland and many big cities would rate higher.
Maybe that’s just because most people don’t live in those cities?
Not really, but I wanted to use this clip…
could be, but most people live near a big city that’s been threatened with violence.
I wish the deficit and national debt were somewhere on that list, but I’m showing my age.
The average person does not know or care about the National debt or deficit. Neither item affects his daily life. He does not care where his food stamps or stimulus check come from, as long as he can buy stuff with the money.
Issue polls seem to designed by bubble-dwelling types so they can shocked at ignorant we rubes are. How dare we care about the wrong issues?
So sad, yet so true.
There’s probably more in your wish than you really contemplate, I mean in terms of cause and effect and the impact on voting issues.
Take these issues or events: voting age, numbers of college educated, average age at marriage and starting a family, years of full-time employment by age 30.
I don’t know your age but I could not vote until I was 21. I had my first full-time job at 18 and I had 10 years of full-time employment by age 30, I was married with 3 children at 32. I got married when I was 27 and prior to that I hadn’t thought very much at all about what I was taking on at that time.
Now young people can vote at 18 and things like full-time work, supporting themselves (much less a family with children) come later than they did with me. But they are taught to have social/political opinions and to express themselves long before they have had any important life experiences and gone through hard periods associated with that.
Don’t be surprised when your concerns don’t make the list.
To be fair, neither do our politicians.
“The economy” may be too abstract. Perhaps if the item was called ‘jobs’ or ‘survival of my business’, the results might be different.
How do you separate the coronavirus and government response (leadership) from the economy and jobs? It seems likely when people respond to that as the top issue it is with a mind to the issues directly affected.
The same holds true for other issues on this list. After months of property damage and violence where the criminals claim to be acting on behalf of minorities, how do you separate the current race relations discussion from these events? How many times have we seen video of people telling protestors to go home because they are hurting the cause? Even those the rioters sought to represent knew these issues would be linked.
And, while I’m at it, that parenthetical “(poor leadership)” could be the anti-incumbency inclination voters have expressed for some years, or a response to the corruption we’ve seen brought to light in the past few years. It could also include the national debt.
This one might be a little more insightful:
Yes, voting officially will be starting at 16, at least in California, while adulthood doesn’t start until 27 officially — up until that age you are still considered a child, at least concerning your “right to health care”. Children voting for the leader of the free world. How’d that ever happen.
Or maybe it’s the determined downplaying of protest violence by the media.
I am unsurprised that Covid holds such a high level of concern. The local governments and the press have been so intent on scaring the population. I get an email every day from the Pierce County Washington department of health with updates about the disease. They begin by saying how many new cases and how many new deaths there are in the county. Pierce County contains the city of Tacoma which is among the larger population centers in the state. It has roughly 900,000 residents. The numbers vary, but have been on a pretty steady rise over the last few weeks. Yesterday there was 134 new cases listed for the county with three new deaths. They then give the ages of the deceased and whether or not they had underlying health conditions which likely contributed to their passing. Then they tell how many total cases have been confirmed and the total number of deaths. It occurred to me a few days ago that the number of new cases may not, in fact, be actual sick people, but, rather, people who have been tested and found positive for the virus. Given how things are reported, it seems a far more likely scenario than the idea that that many people are actually sick since almost none are listed as being hospitalized.
I am left asking myself, would they do this kind of reporting if we were dealing with the flu? Highly unlikely. There is a concerted effort to seed fear in the population, create and exploit a crisis. My cynicism grows daily. I continue to follow the rules, wearing a mask when indoors, and maintaining my distance from others (but that is something I have done habitually for years.) However, I find the rest of this to be total nonsense, particularly when I see people out walking their dogs and riding their bicycles, or simply walking along the paved Foothills trail wearing masks in the open air far from anything resembling a crowd. These people are mindlessly terrified which is exactly the state that the local government seems to want them to be in. Give me a break!
That 14% figure is the percentage of people who chose any economic issue, whether that’s jobs or business or taxes or what have you.
So it includes all of what you say. And apparently this year few people chose economic issues as being of importance.
That’s Gallup, though, and as seen above, Pew Research found different figures.
But neither of them rank Climate Change as being of importance. It’s never ranked of importance even as the media jams it down our throats.
That’s the elephant in the room to me . . .
Complete with its own version of an eschaton: End-times battles against the unwoke, victory wokeness in light and clarity, messianic kingdom of green energy and TANSTAAFL-defying social programs replacing any sense of earning one’s own keep and helping others voluntarily.
Here’s something to factor in about the economic question:
Unemployment Figures Dramatically Favor Republican-Led States
This might also explain the disparity between Pew and Gallup on the economic question: who did they poll and where did they live?
Here’s the article that accompanied the charts posted in the OP, along with Gallup’s analysis.
Gallup says:
Climate change is such a colossal waste of time and resources. A hundred years from now people will look back on it like some pagan tree-hugging religion. But, only if there are still people around and the climate hysterics haven’t eliminated the human impurity from their pristine planet.
Only if we beat the greenists into submission. History is written by the victors, after all.