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VoteCast: Hawaii voters say nation headed wrong way

CRAIG T. KOJIMA / CKOJIMA@STARADVERTISER.COM

Voters line up at the McKinley High School polling place today.

A majority of voters casting midterm election ballots in Hawaii 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 today’s elections, AP VoteCast found that 25 percent of Hawaii voters said the country is on the right track, compared with 74 percent who said the country is headed in the wrong direction.

Here’s a snapshot of who voted and why in Hawaii, based on preliminary results from AP VoteCast, an innovative nationwide survey of about 138,000 voters and nonvoters — including 723 voters and 182 nonvoters in the state of Hawaii — 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 (22 percent), the economy (20 percent), immigration (15 percent), the environment (12 percent) and terrorism (9 percent).

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STATE OF THE ECONOMY

Views of economic conditions in the country are mixed — 53 percent of voters said the nation’s economy is not good, compared with 47 percent who said it’s good.

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TRUMP FACTOR

For 34 percent of Hawaii voters, President Donald Trump was not a factor they considered while casting their vote. By comparison, 65 percent said Trump was a reason for their vote.

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CONTROL OF CONGRESS

Today’s elections will determine control of Congress in the final two years of Trump’s first term in office, and 58 percent of Hawaii 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 723 voters and 182 nonvoters in Hawaii 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 10.7 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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