In this post, we look at the relationship between issue salience, candidate support, and partisanship vary by candidate support using data from the pilot study of the 2016 American National Election Study. This is part of a larger project that examines how different types of Democrats and Republicans vary in their issue priorities. In addition, issue salience may help to get a better handle on crossover voting (Democrats voting for Trump/Republicans voting for Clinton) in the 2016 election.
Below, we plot the percentages of each candidate’s supporters (whether they answered Clinton, Trump, or other/not vote in the general election matchup question) naming the given issue as one of their top four most personally important issues.
We show just Democrats and independents in the first plot, and isolate Republicans and independents in the second plot. We include independents in both groups because the sample sizes for Trump Democrats and (especially) Clinton Republicans is negligible (there are 24 Democrats who support Trump and 4 Republicans who support Clinton). Combining independents with both groups seems to reinforce the patterns when isolating respondents by partisanship (we provide these plots at the bottom of the post), but provides more leverage for the analysis.
The results indicate that crossover voters are indeed more likely to name issues “owned” by the opposite party as important. Issues like immigration, the national debt, and terrorism are more salient to respondents (including Democrats/independents) who support Trump. Conversely, the issues of environmental protection, health care, and income inequality are more salient to Clinton supporters (including Republicans/independents). It doesn’t appear that issue salience is of much help in explaining which respondents say they would vote for another candidate or not vote in a Clinton/Trump matchup—these respondents simply aren’t distinctive in their issue priorities. We thought that the other/not vote Republicans would be more likely to prioritize social issues (abortion and morality), but this doesn’t appear to be the case.
Certainly, some of this is a projection effect, but, especially in a year in which ideology plays such a murky role, issue salience can pick up the slack in modeling vote choice and crossover voting.
Below are show separate plots for Democratic, independent, and Republican respondents. The general findings are consistent with the above graphs, but (especially when it comes to Republicans who support Clinton), the sample sizes are quite small.
Click images to enlarge
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