Establishment elites repeat in an echo chamber that voters don’t care about social issues or, alternatively, that voters favor liberal positions on these issues, so either way, Republicans should avoid them. But Republican candidates are ignoring this coastal-elite groupthink by tackling these issues, and polls show that voters do in fact deeply care about what kind of culture we live in.
On the eve of its Sept. 16 GOP presidential debate, CNN released a poll comparing voters’ attitudes on social issues today to where they were in June of 2011. The result? Voters are far more concerned about those issues now than they were four years ago.
Fox News reported three of the poll’s results, which asked whether an issue was “extremely important” to getting that citizen’s vote. Regarding Americans’ constitutional rights under the Second Amendment to own and bear guns, 22 percent said the issue was extremely important in 2011, and now that number has almost doubled to 42 percent. Regarding the perennial issue of abortion, 20 percent of voters in 2011 thought the issue so important that it should be called “extremely important,” but now that number has climbed to 27 percent. And on illegal aliens in this country, while 29 percent thought the issue was extremely important in 2011, that number has now jumped to 39 percent.
For this poll, CNN interviewed 930 registered voters on Sept. 4 through 8, with a margin of error of 3 percentage points.
Ken Klukowski is legal editor for Breitbart News. Follow him on Twitter @kenklukowski.