There was much to dislike about the three presidential and one vice-presidential debates, but one objection that was near the top of everyone’s list was the narrow range of topics about which the candidates were questioned. Adam Johnson has tabulated the number of questions asked by the moderators about each of the 22 issues they brought up, along with 10 issues that were not included.
Of course, candidates could have brought up issues that were not specifically targeted by the questions. Johnson’s second chart tabulates the number of mentions of each of 33 issues.
Russia, terrorism and taxes were the moderators’ favorites, and Donald Trump’s taxes and Hillary Clinton’s emails received more attention than such issues as climate change, poverty or campaign finance. Johnson describes the framing of the issues as “center-right in nature,” and offers some examples to support his case, i.e., Elaine Quijano’s question, “Do we ask too much of police officers in this country?”
I subsequently ran across an article by Alexander Podkul and Elaine Kamarck of the Brookings Institute. As part of the 2016 Primaries Project, they tabulated the issue positions, taken from their campaign websites, of over 1700 Congressional primary candidates. They found that candidates in the two parties are not talking about the same issues. Here are the top five issues mentioned by Republican and Democratic hopefuls. Aside from their common focus on the Affordable Care Act, there is little overlap.
In the debates, there was one question about Obamacare. With regard to the other top Republican issues, there were four questions about taxes, three about the debt, two about immigation and one about gun control, for a total of eleven questions about Republican issues. The Democrats did not do as well. There were two questions about social security, but the framing suggested it needed to be “reformed” rather than expanded as some Democrats maintain. Since there were no questions about climate change, education or the minimum wage, the Democrats scored a total of three questions. It appears that the debate moderators (or their corporate media bosses) shared the views of Republican candidates about which issues are more important.
Tabulation the number of mentions of each issue yields a similar result. There were 241 mentions of the five Republican issues and 90 mentions of the Democratic issues. (The 45 mentions of Obamacare account for half of the comments about Democratic issues.) Unfortunately, Johnson does not tabulate mentions of the minimum wage, but even if we assume that it was referred to all ten times that poverty came up for discussion, that would still bring the Democratic issue mentions up to only 100.
Of course, these mentions were largely triggered by the debate questions. However, Secretary Clinton could have raised some of the Democrats’ issues more often than she did. Thus a second interpretation of these data is that the Democratic candidate approaches the upcoming election from a more Republican point of view than their Congressional candidates.
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