[raw]
[/raw]
Rising prices for gas and groceries, abortion rights and violent crime – in that order – were the top issues for Minnesota voters who responded to the latest MinnPost/Embold Research poll.
While crime and inflation were cited as top issues by voters of both parties, they were more often of concern to those who identify with the Republican Party. Abortion was an issue mostly for Democratic-supporting voters. That tracks with the campaign themes of the two parties as they compete for eight seats in Congress, 201 seats in the state House and Senate and four statewide partisan offices.
The poll of 1,585 Minnesota residents Oct. 10 through Oct. 14 asked about campaign issues in three ways: Two of the questions were open-ended, with poll respondents offering “in a few words” what they thought were the most important issues facing Minnesota and what was the most important issue facing “your city or town.” Later, they were given a list of 12 issues and asked to choose up to four that “are a priority in your upcoming vote in November.” Crosstabs for the poll can be found here.
There were 1,585 different open-ended answers about Minnesota, but the pollsters did group answers into similar categories when possible. For issues facing the state, 20% of respondents listed crime. After that, 13% of voters polled mentioned inflation, 11% abortion, 10% economy and jobs, 9% taxes, 8% education, 6% democracy and voting, 5% health care, 5% climate and 5% housing.
When the focus was brought to “your city or town,” crime remained at the top at 18%, but housing and taxes were next at 10% each. After those three issues, 9% cited inflation, 8% education, 7% economy and jobs, 4% policing and 3% race/racism/diversity.
When given a list of 12 issues, the cost of goods was shown as the dominant issue of the campaign. Some 61% of poll respondents picked it as one of their four most-concerning issues, with nearly identical concern across age groups, gender and among both white respondents and people of color.
There is a partisan difference, however. Among those who said they voted for Trump in 2020, 80% named inflation as a top issue while only 43% of Biden voters did so.
“Inflation is, by a wide margin, the issue on more voters’ minds than any other – similar to what we’re seeing virtually everywhere across the country,” wrote pollster Ben Greenfield, who managed the poll for Embold Research. “Among (DFL Gov. Tim) Walz voters, abortion is by far the top issue, followed by insurrection and political extremism, climate change and then inflation.
[raw]
[/raw]
“For (GOP nominee Scott) Jensen voters, inflation is by far the top issue, followed by immigration, crime, taxes and the teaching of Critical Race Theory in public schools,” Greenfield wrote.
Abortion has an opposite partisan distribution from inflation. While 43% cited the overturning of Roe v. Wade as a priority issue, the crosstabs of the poll show that it was of priority among Biden voters and was hardly mentioned by Trump voters. Seventy six percent of Biden voters included it among their four choices; 6% of Trump voters did so.
Overturning Roe v. Wade was the second-most cited issue among women poll respondents.
Two more issues divided voters along partisan lines. Among Trump voters, 60% cited crime as an issue of priority; 26% of Biden voters did so. And while 70% of Trump voters mentioned illegal immigration, just 5% of Biden voters agreed.
The Biden-Trump election aftermath colors two other questions as well. “Attacks by political extremists and insurrectionists” was among the 12 issues promoted by the poll. Among Biden voters, 53% cited it; 4% of Trump voters did so.
The poll also asked participants to say which candidate received more votes in 2020. Overall, 64% responded that Biden received more votes; 36% said Trump. Nearly all Biden voters thought the Democratic president received more votes – 97 percent – but only 22 percent of Trump voters believed he received fewer votes nationally.
Biden received 81,268,867 votes; Trump received 74,216,747 votes. The Electoral College tally was 306 for Biden and 232 for Trump. It was the official – and usually ceremonial – opening of each state’s Electoral College votes that was temporarily disrupted by the violent storming of the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.
Minnesota’s 10 Electoral College votes – equal to the number of U.S. House members and senators – went to Biden, who won the state vote 1,717,077 to 1,484,065.
The open-ended responses varied widely. A white, suburban woman who said she was between 18 and 34 years old listed “currently, reproductive rights” as her most important issue facing the state. For her city or town, she wrote “elected officials who are more concerned with reelection than with their constituents.”
A white woman in rural Minnesota between the ages of 50 and 64 said “too many handouts for immigrants, illegal aliens and no help for the working middle class.” An African American woman in the suburban Tin Cities between the ages of 35 and 49 listed “the rise in the cost of living” and “small petty crime.”
A 65-plus white woman from the suburban metro area listed guns as the most important issue facing the state and “lack of good restaurants” as the issue facing her city or town.
Partisan divisions also came up. A 35-to-49 year old, white Twin Cities woman listed “Republicans” and “income equality.” A white woman over 65 from rural Minnesota listed “liberal policies are ruining our state” and “gas and food prices.”
Methodology note
The poll was conducted from Oct. 10 to Oct. 14, and respondents included 1,585 likely general election voters. The poll was conducted by Embold Research, the nonpartisan arm of Change Research. The pollsters recruit respondents via targeted ads on websites and social media platforms. Change Research has a B- pollster rating from FiveThirtyEight.
Embold Research uses a “modeled” margin of error, which it says accounts for the effects of weighting the poll (or making adjustments to better reflect the state’s demographics). The results were weighted on age, gender, race/ethnicity, region, and 2020 presidential vote.
[raw]
MP.highcharts.makeChart(‘.chart-issues1’, $.extend(true, {}, MP.highcharts.barOptions, { legend: { enabled: false }, xAxis: { categories: [‘The rising costs of goods like groceries and gas’,’The Supreme Court overturning Roe v. Wade and state governments banning abortion’,’Violent crime’,’Illegal immigration and the situation at the U.S.-Mexico border’,’The amount of taxes you pay’,’Voter suppression and fraud’,’Attacks by political extremists and insurrectionists’,’The cost of housing’,’Extreme weather events and the impact of climate change’,’The teaching of Critical Race Theory in public schools’,’Lack of good jobs in your community’,’China taking US jobs’,’Something else (please specify)’]}, yAxis: { title: { text: ‘%’} }, tooltip: { formatter: function(){ return ‘ ‘ + this.x + ‘‘ + ‘: ‘ + MP.formatters.number(this.y,0) + ‘%’ +”; } }, series: [
{ name: ‘% listing as one of up to four top issues’, data: [61,43,42,34,34,30,29,26,26,24,6,5,11], }
]
}));
[/raw]
I’d like to know what contribution people think state and local governments can make to controlling inflation. They are affected by it as much as the people of Minnesota, probably more so in such areas as energy costs.
Jensen says he’ll cut costs. How, exactly? At whose cost?
We could start with a 10% across-the-board state government spending cut, department by department. Then they could cut taxes 10% with that savings to help people deal with the higher prices imposed by Biden’s war on the fossil fuel industry.
Tax cuts are inflationary. They increase the supply of money. If you really want to curb inflation you would want a tax increase, not a tax decrease. That would take money out of circulation. The large budget surplus the state has amassed is actually a great way to fight inflation.
There is no fiscal policy the state can undertake that can reduce the national inflation rate. Further, cutting income taxes by state and federal governments can only make inflation worse, no exceptions. But of course that’s exactly what our economically-illiterate national Repubs are proposing, because that’s their “solution” for every economic situation.
As for cutting ongoing government spending, state or federal, I thought I was recently being told by delighted “conservatives” that we are in a recession. Well, you don’t cut government spending in a recession, although (once again) that is the “conservative” prescription, blindly followed no matter what the macroeconomic situation might be.
“And nothing Biden has done or not done has any impact on gas prices, but I know that facts don’t matter.”
Thank you for pointing out the stupidity of the President depleting our Strategic Oil Reserve.
The most direct way would be a decrease in sales taxes, which would force a commensurate reduction in services like education. But Republicans are not proposing this.
Housing is currently the biggest driver of inflation because it is artificially scarce. This is the product of over-regulation at the local level. The logical long-term strategy is to pass statewide pre-emption laws to force cities to deregulate housing. This would allow more housing to be built faster and cheaper. Republicans are not proposing this either.
Republican candidates in Minnesota love to complain about inflation, but show no interest in working to address it. And the press isn’t asking them what they plan to cut.
I agree that the most direct way to reduce the price of what Minnesotans pay at the store is to reduce our sales tax rate, which is one of the highest in the nation. This is probably the most effective way to return the surplus to taxpayers without causing further inflationary pressures. Because there is a budget surplus we can reduce sales tax rates without cutting services.
We have inflation because in theSo spring and summer, government leaders of both parties were afraid the economy would collapse. What they chose to do was pump money into the economy, a policy they knew was inflationary in the long run, but which answered the immediate problem. As Keynes famously observed in the long run we are all dead, but a lot of people die in the short term, too.
So now we are paying the price we incurred in saving the economy. Republicans who threw money at the economy and who cashed the stimulus checks, are now engaged in an extraordinarily convenient act of collective amnesia. Nothing happened in 2020, apart from the occasional case of the sniffles. The economy thrived, the mobile morgues were just a nightmare from which we have awakened, and the inflation is all Joe Biden’s fault. Meanwhile, Republicans will do everything they can to reduce inflation in the next two years by throwing as many people out of work, and then blame the Democrats for it.
Despair, they tell me is a sin, and I do try to resist it’s lure. But I do admit Republicans who lack the honesty required of cynicism do make it difficult.
There is another driver of inflation – high energy costs due to increases in the cost of fossil fuels. Unfortunately there is no magic wand we can wave to find new supplies of cheap fossil fuels. We already extracted most of the easy to extract oil and gas. What’s left is deep offshore, in dirty tar sands deposits or requires fracking. The best way to combat rising fossil fuel costs is to reduce demand for them. Transitioning away from fossil fuels is the only way to reduce energy costs in the long term. The only debatable question is how quickly we need to complete that transition.
There is another driver of inflation – high energy costs due to increases in the cost of fossil fuels.
Actually, there is a magic wand for lowering energy prices. We can withdraw our support for Ukraine. That would mean Russian energy shipments to the west would resume, and the Saudis would increase production of oil. Energy prices would then drop, and economic pressures on Europe would ease. And I think this will happen when Republicans gain control of Congress next year, support for Ukraine will be reduced or eliminated altogether. And I can’t tell you with any certainty that withdrawal of support would be the wrong policy. Ukraine is, after all, a faraway country of which we know nothing.
Withdrawing support for Ukraine guarantees that Moldova falls next. The question after that is whether Putin would focus on Georgia, the Baltics or head straight into Poland.
I’m a liberal. I am concerned about crime. That is why I support gun control. That is why I believe police officers who kill suspects in custody should go to prison. Executives who cheat their customers should be face personal consequences, not receiving a “get of jail card” for their company paying a fine and denying a crime occurred. Our lawlessness is evident any time one is out of the road – and I’m not talking about broken taillights. I think we should have stop light cameras to automatically ticket those who run red lights. Above all the many crimes of Donald Trump, including trying to end our democracy, should be punished.
Polls assume the word “crime” has a common definition. It no longer does. Americans pick and choose what laws they respect – and only want others held accountable for their law breaking. Republicans, following the example of Trump, promote this kind of “above the law” thinking. This lack of common definition makes questions about “crime” impossible to interpret. At the minimum, ask about categories of crime. Foggy thinking is getting in the way of solutions.
Joel, I agree give tickets out to folks who break traffic laws, no problem. Car jackings are up 300%, do you suggest a ticket for that also? That is what is happening BTW, folks are let out without bail for violent crimes. If your biggest worry is corporate crime, you truly are privileged. Most regular folks are worried about, shootings up, murders up, muggings up, carjackings up, armed robbery up. To each his own, I guess.
Perception. Is Crime really “up”. How about you show us some stats on that?
Prosecutors are getting 100 month sentences for convicted carjackers. Do you think that is too light?
https://www.justice.gov/usao-mn/pr/minneapolis-woman-sentenced-100-months-prison-role-violent-twin-cities-carjacking-spree
Of course sentencing after the fact does nothing to prevent crime in the first place.
Surely you’re not suggesting that locking up that one teenager would end carjackings in Minneapolis. Organized crime is recruiting teenage boys to commit these crimes. If it hadn’t been this teenage boy it would have been a different teenage boy. You really need to ask yourself why there seems to be an unlimited supply of teenagers and young adults willing to commit carjackings.
Another quote from an MPR article linked in the article you linked. ““There really isn’t evidence to show that increasing the proportion of police is going to drive down carjacking or other related offenses,” Kollmann said. Chicago has the highest per capita police presence of all major cities in the U.S., and a wave of carjackings has still hit the city, Kollmann added.”
https://www.mprnews.org/episode/2021/12/14/why-has-a-wave-of-carjackings-hit-the-twin-cities
One pertinent answer to my question is the number of students who were not allowed to attend school in person for almost two years. Like many pandemic dislocations it has hit the people most at risk the hardest. You have a bunch of teenagers who basically stopped attending school and had a lot of free time. This made them easy targets for organized crime to recruit.
Two years of online schooling is causing a drop in student performance that appears to be sticky (they aren’t bouncing back quickly). We have done exactly nothing as a state to try to correct for these learning losses. That means we should be prepared for an increase in crime for a generation as these undereducated children move into adulthood. We need to ask whether we spend more on education now or more on policing later.
So here is my problem with polls. If we don’t know whether they are accurate, why are they reported as news. Why do we claim that the represent the views of the electorate when we know they don’t?
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2022/10/24/opinion/frustrated-with-polling-pollsters-are-too.html