As predicted, there was a role for health care issues in voters’ 2012 election decision, but Kaiser’s November Health Tracking Poll—fielded in the days immediately following last week’s presidential election—suggests it was a trailing issue rather than a leading one.
To keep the issue list in perspective, the November survey first asked voters to name the top two factors in their vote in an open‐ended question, without providing answer choices. Here we confirm the importance of the candidates’ personal characteristics in voters’ decisions: for both those supporting President Barack Obama and those backing Governor Mitt Romney, it was the voters’ sense of the characteristics and records of the candidates themselves rather than any one issue that was at the top of their minds. [cont. – PDF]
Kaiser Family Foundation