Frustrated voters have accused politicians in the 2016 presidential field of neglecting vital issues they feel are crucial to their own prospects and to the future of the US and the world, Guardian US has found.
While climate change dominated voters’ concerns, economic inequality, political corruption and foreign policy anxieties also ranked highly among the issues that respondents told us they felt had not been properly discussed so far in the 2016 election cycle.
Many people who responded to a Guardian online call-out, expressed personal fears about their own lives or those of their loved ones, ranging from the struggle to find work, acquire healthcare or pay for exorbitant college fees.
In total, we received 1,385 responses from across all 50 states, many expressing anger and skepticism that the presidential candidates were motivated by anything other than private gain.
Writing from Florida, Henderson Galbreath, 33, said: “I generally find it incredibly difficult to believe that someone is invested in meaningful change when they, too, have been purchased by the oil & gas and telecoms industries.”
The intense dissatisfaction that many voters feel about the process surfaced as the pool of presidential hopefuls was whittled down from 23 to two – the Democratic presumptive nominee Hillary Clinton and her Republican rival Donald Trump. One in 10 respondents who contacted Guardian US during the 2016 primary season said that in their view American democracy itself was in peril: they replied that political corruption or the distortion of campaign finance by big money was the single more important issue that candidates had failed to address.
Some very diverse issues came to light when readers were asked: “Can you explain which one issue – that affects your life – you wish the presidential candidates were discussing more?”
Some used the question as an opportunity to discuss a wide variety of personal concerns, including “horsemeat ending up in our food”, “DC statehood” and “free public transport”.
One reader detailed her self-induced abortion and talked about lack of access to resources. Others used the call-out as an opportunity to provide feedback about the Guardian’s election coverage so far.
Some used the form as a way to make presumably sarcastic remarks about the quality of the debate so far. One respondent, a 53-year-old in Connecticut, presumably deeply unimpressed at the way the primary season debate deviated towards candidates’ penis size, told us that he had so far not heard enough from the presidential candidates about “the volume, in cubic centimeters, of Donald Trump’s scrotum”.
Economic inequality was a top concern, accounting for 11% of all of the responses we received. With the sluggish recovery underlined by disappointing recent jobs reports that showed the weakest growth in six years, many of the readers who participated sounded anxious and perturbed.
Unfair income disparities were a strong theme, expressed in a variety of forms that included taxation, student loans or “the shrinking middle class”. In several cases, respondents described how they personally were affected by economic inequality – for example, 77-year-old Jon Appleton in Hawaii wrote: “I lost half of my life’s savings in the crash of 2008. None of the bankers, complicit government officials, etc have gone to jail. The so-called recovery only works for the big banks and corporations.”
Carlos Andrade from Florida talked of his daughter who has a three-year-old girl: “She and her husband would love to have another baby but can’t afford to due to the high costs of healthcare and education.”
Jackie Owsley, a Trump supporter from Montana, said she’d worked hard to put herself through school and get an engineering degree, only to lose her job, she said, to an overseas guest worker on an H1-B visa. “You cannot imagine the indignity of being forced to train your replacement,” she wrote to us.
A 24-year-old Bernie Sanders supporter from Illinois, who asked to remain anonymous, said she had no idea how she was going to pay back her student loans. “Once you leave college reality hits you hard – jobs are hard to find, leaving you hanging for months and working for the bone for barely enough to live on.”
The exercise drew in more than 1,300 respondents, but is a snapshot of a self-selecting group rather than a scientifically weighted sample. Many of the concerns being voiced come from a liberal perspective – overall, 80% said they planned to support a Democratic candidate, a far higher share than the 31% of Americans overall who describe themselves as Democratic (which rises to 49% if those who say they are “Democrat-leaning” are included).
The respondents came from across the US, including 19% who said they lived in California, which is home to only 11% of the US population. The political and geographic lean of respondents probably contributed to climate change emerging as such a pressing concern.
Although foreign policy has been a talking point in several presidential debates, many of the respondents felt it had not been sufficiently addressed. But under this broad title, many different issues were raised, from “US support for Israel” (readers fell on both sides of that argument) to “the refugee crisis”.
A common theme however were concerns about military spending, most often motivated by a belief that current levels were too high. Gregory Clark, 58 in Ohio wrote: “The insane, bloated military and “security” budget. What this nation could be if half of that money could go towards education, health care, housing, alternative energy – the cost of the imperialist, interventionist state is deplorable.”
Together, job security, discrimination, health, immigration, social security and education made up a quarter of all of the responses the Guardian received. Many readers were concerned about the way that minorities were disproportionately affected by policy in these areas – and those concerns were especially clear in the category “discrimination”.
There, we grouped all responses about minority rights – they included equal pay for women, age discrimination in the workplace, Islamophobia and LGBT rights.
Living in Wisconsin, 28 year-old Jeremy Annunziata told us “what about disability people like myself? I have high functioning autism and nobody cares about us especially politicians”.
Paul Parker, 28, wrote: “I want a serious conversation on reparations. Seeing that the diaspora of black people from Africa to the US was central for this country’s economic origins. Are the candidates for or against any payout?”
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Note: quotes have been lightly edited for grammar and brevity.
