Few individual news events have the power to singlehandedly rearrange voters’ electoral priorities. But if anything held that possibility, it might have been the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe vs. Wade. …
What voters care about, and how those priorities influence their decisions, is too complicated to be fully captured in a single poll question. The degree to which voters personally care about an issue is different from the question of whether that issue will be decisive in an election, either by motivating someone to vote when they wouldn’t have otherwise, or by convincing them to vote for a different candidate than they would have otherwise. But comparing the answers to different questions can provide a broader, more nuanced, picture.
Here’s a look at several ways pollsters ask about election issues, what they can — and can’t — tell us about public opinion, and what some early data might suggest about how the aftermath of the Roe decision has played out so far. CONTINUED
Ariel Edwards-Levy, CNN
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