With one day left until Election Day, voter focus has shifted regarding key issues like abortion and immigration – but inflation remains the top issue when it comes to the presidential election.
That’s the finding in the fourth and final survey from University of South Florida researchers in their 2024 election series.
They polled 1,500 registered voters nationwide via an online web-panel between October 22-27 with the goal of tracking how social media usage affects political polarization, politics-related stress levels, and belief in election-related misinformation.
“This will be the third election cycle with misinformation and the way that it's amplified through social media,” said Megan Corn, a graduate student and research assistant at the USF School of Public Affairs.
“A lot of people are turning to social media now for news and information and I think that because it's so easy for misinformation to spread on platforms like that, voters are taking it in and it's becoming more real to them.”
Alongside seeing which false claims voters believe, researchers asked what the most important issues are when they’re deciding who to vote for.
What do voters care about this election?
More than a quarter (28%) of respondents identified abortion as one of the top three issues influencing how they’ll vote, up 7% from the August survey results.
“Over the past three months, there has been a small but notable increase in voters’ focus on abortion and social policy issues,” reads the report.
Meanwhile, 37% identified immigration as one of the top three issues, down from its high point of 51% in August.
Pocketbook issues remain the primary focus of surveyed voters, with inflation and the economy and jobs consistently ranking 1-2 as the most important issues since January.
A majority (63.3%) of survey-takers describe the overall condition of the U.S. economy as “weak,” with a majority of Republicans describing it as “very weak.”
Election-related misinformation
Survey-takers were also asked to indicate whether they believed eight statements about current political events were true or false. Five were based on misinformation.
One of the false items addressed claims that Haitian immigrants currently living in Springfield, Ohio have stolen and eaten household pets — a statement amplified by Republican vice presidential candidate JD Vance.
Out of the eight statements, this was the one most survey-takers (74.4%) correctly identified as false.
Of the three true statements, respondents were most closely divided when it comes to the question of whether or not they believed cases of voter fraud are rare in the U.S. Presidential elections. 55.2% voted “definitely true” or “probably true,” compared to 44.8% who selected “probably false” or “definitely false.”
The survey cites studies from the Brennan Center for Justice and a press release from the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) stating that the 2020 U.S. presidential election was "the most secure in American history," with no evidence of votes being deleted, changed, or compromised.
Voters are chronically stressed
The survey also found that voter attitudes were barely impacted after major political events, leading researchers to believe we are in a period of what they call “chronic stress.”
The two events researchers used as markers between polls from May and now were the first assassination attempt on Donald Trump on July 13, and when Joe Biden dropped out of the presidential race eight days later.
Neither of these events produced a significant shift in the stress levels of survey takers, positively or negatively.
“It was [by] the 3rd survey (in August) when I came to that realization that maybe we're just stalled out,” said Savannah Havird, a graduate student and research assistant at the USF School of Public Affairs. “Maybe we're just so used to the stress that goes around the election that we're just constantly at that level.”
The survey was sponsored by CyberFlorida and conducted with a confidence level of 95% and a margin of error of +/- 2.53.
For more detailed survey findings, click here.
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