In May, All In Together worked with Echelon Insights to discover the top issues for women in the 2024 elections. For Republican women the top three issues were cost of living, immigration, and crime, followed closely by abortion and guns. Because of the close tie between crime and guns during campaign speeches and the debates, the two issues were combined for this analysis. In the first Republican Presidential Primary debate, these top issues received very little discussion compared to issues like education and foreign policy.
In the second debate on September 27, these top issues continued to receive minimal discussion, with less than 15% of each candidate’s sentences focused on these four topics combined. Immigration was the most mentioned issue by all of the candidates except for Doug Burgum, who focused more of his attention on guns and crime. Only two candidates, Ron DeSantis and Chris Christie touched on all four of the top issues.
In contrast to the previous debate, Republican women’s top issue of cost of living was mentioned by all 7 of the candidates on the stage.
In the first debate, many of the keywords associated with each topic appeared to be solutions and policy focused for some issues with words like protecting and securing associated with borders and bans and legislation associated with abortion. In this debate the keywords appear to be more descriptive rather than policy focused. Spending and debt are new keywords associated with cost of living from this debate, perhaps owing to the Congressional spending bills and potential government shutdown looming over the debate.
For more information about what each candidate had to say about an issue click on the bubbles in the chart below.
In our previous polling this year, we have found that Republican women are some of the most motivated voters for 2024. As we noted in our previous report, speaking to the most important issues for Republican women should be a priority for the candidates. Even with fewer candidates on the stage these issues are not addressed to the satisfaction of the voters.
Note: AIT searched for keywords related to these top-priority issues. The data analysis above uses those numbers, but it should be noted that keyword search alone may have missed some mentions of each topic. General trends can still be discovered with this methodology.
