New Clean Elections poll highlights the issues voters care about most

It’s an election year, and candidates of all stripes are debating a variety of issues, often on Arizona Horizon. But what are the issues that are of most concern to Arizona voters? The Arizona Clean Elections Commission recently took a survey to find out. Here to talk about what was found is Tom Collins, executive director of the Clean Elections Commission.

The survey, taken during March and April of 2022, covered a variety of categories, including where voters get information, primary voter demographics and issue breakdown by party.

Republican voters tend to be older, men, Dems tend to be younger, women, and women with children. The demographics average out during general elections, according to Collins. He said that partisan voters may also skew on age.

Issues voters want to hear candidates speak about:

The top five issues varied between the two major parties, but jobs, health care and education were consistently a priority.

What about election security on the Republican list?

Tom Collins: “I think, by and large, the elections issue probably is a niche issue, I mean I think that the folks who really are interested in election integrity, as the words are used by folks on the Internet specifically, I think that’s really not something that goes to folks’ day-to-day life. It’s very technical, it’s very confusing to folks…but I think when you get into the kind of minutiae the some of the election conspiracies rely on in order to try to make this case that somehow there’s something suspect with the election system, a lot of people really just glaze over that and, frankly, they kind of should.”

The environment as an issue sat tenth overall on Democrat primary voters’ list of issues.

“The survey results reflect what folks are hearing and maybe they themselves are participating in,” Collins said.

Other survey topics included what sources partisan voters get election information from, with T.V. as the frontrunner for both major parties.