Exit Poll Chaos: Dueling Polls Conflict On Importance of Economy For Voters

The economy has ranked as the number one issue for voters in most polls over the past year.

But the two most influential exit polls released on Tuesday night conflict about just how important the economy is for voters.

The AP VoteCast—a survey of more than 110,000 registered voters in all 50 states, conducted by NORC at the University of Chicago for Fox News, PBS NewsHour, The Wall Street Journal, and The Associated Press that took place from Oct. 28 – Nov. 5—found that 39 percent said the economy was the top issue facing the country.

The exit polls conducted by Edison Research for ABC News, CBS News, CNN, and NBC News found that 31 percent of election day voters said the economy was their top issue. That put it second to the state of democracy at 35 percent.

The eight point gap is larger that the margins of errors for the polls.

The Edison exit polls found a sharp partisan divide over which issue voters saw as the most important. Fifty-one percent of Trump voters said the economy was their top issue, followed by immigration at 20 percent, and the state of democracy at 12 percent. Among Harris voters, 56 percent said the state of democracy was their top issue, 21 percent named abortion as most important, and 13 percent said the economy.

Both the AP and Edison polls have had to adapt to the fact that many Americans now vote early or vote by mail. Edison estimates that half of votes this year will be cast prior to election day. As a result, pollsters have conducted interviews with in-person voting at polling places beginning last week and have used telephone interviews to reach mail-in voters.