A majority of voters casting midterm election ballots in Rhode Island said the country is headed in the wrong direction, according to a wide-ranging survey of the American electorate.
As voters cast ballots for governor, U.S. Senate and members of Congress in Tuesday’s elections, AP VoteCast found that 33 percent of Rhode Island voters said the country is on the right track, compared with 67 percent who said the country is headed in the wrong direction.
Here’s a snapshot of who voted and why in Rhode Island, based on preliminary results from AP VoteCast, an innovative nationwide survey of about 135,000 voters and nonvoters _ including 771 voters and 209 nonvoters in the state of Rhode Island _ conducted for The Associated Press by NORC at the University of Chicago.
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TOP ISSUES
Voters considered several issues to be important to their vote in this midterm election, including health care (25 percent), immigration (22 percent), the economy (18 percent), terrorism (8 percent) and gun policy (8 percent).
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STATE OF THE ECONOMY
Voters have a positive view of the nation’s current economic outlook _ 59 percent said the nation’s economy is good, compared with 40 percent who said it’s not good.
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TRUMP FACTOR
For 40 percent of Rhode Island voters, President Donald Trump was not a factor they considered while casting their vote. By comparison, 60 percent said Trump was a reason for their vote.
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CONTROL OF CONGRESS
Tuesday’s elections will determine control of Congress in the final two years of Trump’s first term in office, and 65 percent of Rhode Island voters said which party will hold control was very important as they considered their vote. Another 25 percent said it was somewhat important.
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AP VoteCast is a survey of the American electorate in all 50 states conducted by NORC at the University of Chicago for The Associated Press and Fox News. The survey of 771 voters and 209 nonvoters in Rhode Island was conducted Oct. 29 to Nov. 6, concluding as polls close on Election Day. Interviews in English and Spanish with self-identified registered voters selected from opt-in online panels are calibrated with interviews of randomly sampled registered voters nationwide. The margin of sampling error for voters is estimated to be plus or minus 10.5 percentage points. Although there is no statistically agreed upon approach for calculating margins of error for non-probability samples, the margin of error is estimated using a calculation called the root mean squared error and other statistical adjustments. All surveys are subject to multiple sources of error, including from sampling, question wording and order, and nonresponse. Find more details about AP VoteCast’s methodology at http://www.ap.org/votecast.
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AP created this story automatically using data from NORC.
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Online:
http://www.apnews.com/apvotecast
