What issues do you care about?

Posted at 2:32 PM on May 10, 2006 by Bob Collins

This message from Andrew Haeg, who heads up MPR's Public Insight Journalism network.

* * *

A little while back (as previously reported here) we reached out to our audience (and beyond) to find out what issues people think are most important issues this election season, and why.

More than 2,000 people have responded, from across the political spectrum and from every established party, and have told us what their first and second choices are, and why . (We plucked all of the issues directly from the lists of issues that candidates said they were going to be focusing on this election season.)

We’re only now beginning to analyze the responses. At the moment, all we have is this graphic showing what issues respondents ID’d as most important, and 2nd most important.

It’s not scientific. It’s not even quasi-scientific. Think of it as a Polaroid snapshot: a little blurry, a little fuzzy but authentic and pretty interesting.

What do you see in it?

We’ll be providing some more analysis here at some point soon and look at what other issues people think are important; and we’ll be looping back to those who responded over the next several months to gauge voter sentiment and to get their questions for the candidates.

It’s the sort of interactive give-and-take with our audience that we’ve wanted to engage in for a long time here at MPR, but only recently have developed the wherewithal to do, via Public Insight Journalism.

Download pdf file of responses.

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