The bad news just keeps piling up for those involved with President Biden's reelection campaign. In the latest blow, Gallop has released polling results on issues Americans name as most important, and it's something of an understatement to note that these are issues that aren't exactly Joe Biden's strong points.
Amid the heightened numbers of migrants entering the United States at the Southern border and discord in the Middle East, Americans have grown more anxious about immigration and terrorism over the past year. At the same time, with the inflation rate down from 2023, public concern about that issue has eased. Nevertheless, more Americans still say they worry about inflation than any of 13 other issues rated in the new survey.
Gallup finds a slightly different rank-order of concerns with its “most important problem facing this country" question. For the second straight month, immigration leads Americans’ unprompted answers about what most ails the nation, with inflation also figuring prominently.
Gallup, in this report, first focuses on answers to this question:
Next, I’m going to read a list of problems facing the country. For each one, please tell me if you personally worry about this problem a great deal, a fair amount, only a little or not at all?
This is a "prompted" question, and the results are interesting; "inflation," "crime and violence," "hunger and homelessness," and "the economy" are the top four. That isn't surprising, as those are issues that have been, let's say, not developing in favor of the incumbent.
But then Gallup asked an "unprompted" question, and I think this is much more telling.
What do you think is the most important problem facing this country today?
The results were quite different, with "immigration" and (get this) "government/poor leadership" being the top two issues named by a wide margin. The next two are "the economy in general" and "high cost of living/inflation," with every other issue dropping into single digits. Yes, including abortion.
That's very informative (assuming it's accurate; with pollsters, one never knows), and here's why:
None of these are issues that the Biden campaign wants to run on. But these are the issues that, when asked without prompting, Americans think are the most important. On the border, the Biden administration hasn't just been absent; they have been openly encouraging illegal immigration. See these great RedState articles for examples of the Biden administration's and, let's not forget, Congressional Democrats' failures on all of these top four issues:
See Related: 'Indefensible': Sen. Bill Hagerty re: Senate Dems' Vote on Taxpayer Funding of Illegal Immigrant Flights
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Granted, the record of pollsters over the last few cycles hasn't been all that hot. I distinctly remember being in a Colorado elk camp on election night in 2016 and crawling into my sleeping bag depressed about the idea of Hillary Clinton's presidency, which all the polls assured us was absolutely a done deal. But a campaign has to operate on the best available information, and if you look at the news stories — not just here at RedState but anywhere — you'll see that these are at the forefront of the news cycle almost every day. Especially, I would argue, immigration, as not only are there economic impacts, but the Hamas October 7th attacks on Isreal, as well as the more recent Crocus City Hall attacks in Moscow, have given us a much more compelling reason to get control of our borders. It bears repeating: Millions of people have come into the country illegally since Joe Biden took office, and we have very little idea who most of them are, where they are going, and what they intend to do when they get there.
I've been saying and will keep saying, that immigration is likely the issue that will decide the 2024 presidential election. Gallup would seem to agree when the report concludes:
Immigration’s status as the most prominent top-of-mind issue for Americans signals that a major segment of the electorate is acutely focused on this issue.
We can only hope that the Trump campaign is paying attention.
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