Voices of America: what we learned speaking to voters across the US

Americans aren’t the demographic caricatures painted by politicians and pundits – and they deserve more than just soundbites on the campaign trail

'The 2016 election has been dominated on one side by promises to erect walls along the southern border and ban Muslims, and by pledges of free college and political revolution on the other.

So far, the race has also been epitomized by voters who feel that politicians (and the media) just don’t listen to them or address their problems.

In this kind of environment, it’s not enough – nor was it ever enough – to go to a few political rallies, talk to people who have already made up their minds about for whom they’ll vote and present their viewpoints to readers as more broadly indicative of voter sentiment. It seemed entirely possible that a significant part of the American electorate did not spend their time obsessed with immigration, college tuition, tiny hands, email servers or whatever the candidates’ issues du jour were; in fact, it seemed more likely than not.

And while it’s not easy to get a handle on the lives, hopes and dreams of 324 million individuals, we wanted to try to provide a more realistic picture of how people talk to one another about those lives and the policies that affect them, away from slogans and signs and cheering. We wanted to talk to the kinds of voters that politicians are courting, and the ones they tend to ignore, in swing states and in solidly partisan ones, in big, growing cities and places that are shrinking, and we wanted to listen as they talked to, not at, each other.

And, while, yes, the university students talked about the burden of student debt they’re all facing, they also brought up foreign policy and climate change. Our working mothers group talked about the minimum wage and paid sick leave, but also addressed what they considered “family values” – which they defined as parenting skills, not opposition to abortion.'>>>

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/jul/10/what-we-learned-from-us-voters