Throughout the general election season, the Winston Group has been analyzing the presidential and vice presidential debates to quantify how the question topics interact with voters’ key concerns for election day. As noted in our previous report on the last presidential debate, jobs and the economy remains the number one issue for general election voters.
In the debates, questions about electability and foreign policy are well-represented among all the debate questions. In fact, these two topics tie as the most asked-about topics across all three main debates and the vice presidential debate. As for the questions posed to each candidate, the two tickets are roughly even when it comes to the number of questions received pertaining to the different topics. Trump-Pence, however, slightly outpaces Clinton-Kaine in both number of questions received and overall speaking time. They also continue to receive more questions about electability when compared with Clinton-Kaine.
Here, we present our analysis of debate topics, number of questions addressed to candidates, and more for the third and final presidential debate. As we also stated in our last report, many voters report feeling dissatisfied with the current state of political discourse, a dissatisfaction that is markedly worse than it has been in recent years. As the election draws closer, understanding how well the debates address voters’ concerns is key.
