WASHINGTON: Carol Jones knows what she wants to hear Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump discuss during their first televised debate: education and jobs. She’s far from sure which candidate will earn her vote on Election Day.
“All we see is the cat fighting,” said the Shirley, Ark., retired substitute teacher. At Monday’s debate, the 70-year-old says, “They need to talk about their programs ... but I don’t think they will.”
A majority of Americans, like Jones, say they’re frustrated, angry — or both — with the 2016 presidential election, according to a new poll by the Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research. Most Americans aren’t feeling proud or hopeful about the race, and half feel helpless, the results find. Majorities of Americans want more focus on issues that are important to them.
Apathy isn’t the problem, the survey found. Eighty-six percent are paying at least some attention to the race.
The campaign is certainly hard to miss. Trump and Clinton are the two least popular presidential candidates in history, and their ferocious battle is smashing precedents and dominating public discourse.
Trump has built his campaign in large part on attention-getting — and frequently untrue — accusations, such as that his opponent “is the devil” and President Barack Obama “founded” the Islamic State group. But he’s found success linking the nation’s immigration woes to its national security concerns, the latter of which is rated by Americans as among the top issues facing the country.
Clinton is a former senator and secretary of state who is an avowed foreign and domestic policy wonk. She has tried to make the election, in part, a referendum on Trump’s fitness for office. Her recent stumble during an abrupt exit from this year’s 9/11 memorial ceremony, captured on video, added to the reality show quality of the election. Her campaign disclosed that she’d been diagnosed with pneumonia.
Clinton and Trump have clear political and stylistic objectives during their first debate Monday, the first of three such showdowns certain to influence the race in its final six weeks.
The survey found that nearly two-thirds of Americans say the campaign focuses too little on the issues that matter to them personally. More than 6 in 10 Americans of both parties agree. A bit more than half say there’s been too little focus on the candidates’ qualifications, with Democrats being more likely than Republicans to feel that way, 61 percent to 45 percent. And more than half of Americans in the survey said the campaign is focused too much on the personal characteristics of the candidates, with Republicans and Democrats about equally likely to feel that way.
The issues Americans care most about? Health care comes in first, with 81 percent listing that as very or extremely important, while similarly high percentages said the same about Social Security, education, terrorism and homeland security.
The AP-NORC poll of 1,022 adults was conducted Sept. 15-18 using a sample drawn from NORC’s probability-based AmeriSpeak panel, which is designed to be representative of the U.S. population.