The Winston Group has been analyzing the Republican primary debates to build a picture of how the topics covered interact with what voters have said — through surveys and exit polls — are their greatest concerns and the issues that are most important to them in choosing for whom they will vote in 2016.
Across the first two Republican primary debates, we continued to see a pattern we had first noticed while analyzing the 2012 primary debates — that while the economy is the top issue for Republican primary voters, it struggled as a question topic in debates. While the third debate, hosted by CNBC, was supposed to be completely focused on questions on the economy, the topic still fell far short as many other topics were introduced. Although questions about the economy comprised the greatest percentage of overall questions to date in the fourth Republican debate, hosted by Fox Business/WSJ, the terror attacks in Paris and San Bernardino dramatically shifted the tone of the debates and the priorities of the question topics. Questions about foreign policy and national security began to take center stage. Foreign policy and national security remained an incredibly important and much discussed topic moving into 2016. It was the most asked about topic in the January 14 debate hosted by Fox Business, a trend which continued in the ABC News Feb 6 and CBS News Feb 13 debates. In the CNN Feb 25 debate, immigration was the most asked about topic, but in the Fox News March 3 debate, foreign policy and national security returned as the most asked about question topic, followed by electability and immigration tied for second. In the CNN/Washington Times March 10 debate, foreign policy and national security tied with electability as the most popular question topics.
Here we continue our analysis of debate topics, candidate speaking times, and more, including information from the twelfth Republican debate and ninth Democratic debate. How well did the debates address the concerns and questions of voters?
