In Their Own Words: Economy Remains the Most Important Issue for Voters

  • When asked to respond in their own words, 31% of voters say the Economy is the most important issue right now.
    • Among 2,000 registered voters, Immigration (17%) and Politics (14%) also ranked highly.
    • Foreign Policy (7%) and Social Issues (6%) are also commonly at the top of voters’ minds.
    • For Republicans, the top three issues identified as most important were Economy (36%), Immigration (25%), and Politics (13%).
    • For Democrats, the top issues were Economy (28%), Politics (16%), and Immigration (10%)
    • ICE (5%) has been consistently declining in voters’ top concern rankings since its high of 13% in our January 28th survey.
    • We are currently undergoing performance enhancements with out categorization tool which result in a deeper level of categorization. We apologize for any inconvenience in comparing to historical data.
  • There are many ways to ask about the importance of issues. Napolitan News routinely asks an open-ended question that is categorized and summarized by using Jigsaw’s open-source Sensemaker tool (which is built on Gemini, Google’s most advanced AI) so that voters can answer the question in their own words.
    • Consistently, in both the list and open-ended formats, Economic issues are the top issues.
    • Our most recent list format results are from our February 25th poll.


This data is from a Napolitan News Service survey of 2,000 Registered Voters conducted online by Scott Rasmussen, February 17-19, 2026. RMG Research, Inc., conducted the field work for the survey. It has a margin of error of +/- 2.2.