WASHINGTON — Voters in Saturday’s Democratic presidential primary election in South Carolina called health care the top issue facing the country today, clearly naming it as more important than the economy, climate change, immigration, race relations and guns.
That’s a change from Iowa and New Hampshire, where Democrats put climate change alongside health care as the top issue facing the country — far above all others.
About 4 in 10 voters on Saturday picked health care as the top issue, according to a wide-ranging AP VoteCast survey of the Democratic primary electorate in South Carolina. Twenty-one percent said the economy and jobs are the most important, while 14 percent of voters identified climate change. Roughly 1 in 10 called out race relations.
The AP VoteCast survey also found that a smaller share of Democratic voters in South Carolina than in Iowa and New Hampshire said it was more important to support a candidate who would fundamentally change how the system in Washington works than one who would restore the political system to how it was before President Donald Trump took office. Forty-five percent said they’d prefer a return to the Obama era.
