Issues That Separate Obama and Romney Promoters

In my previous post, I examined the Net Promoter Scores (NPS) for President Obama and Mitt Romney. The research, which is based on a survey of 5,000 U.S. consumers in August, showed that Obama scored higher than Romney. Both candidates, however, have very low NPS (-57% for Romney and -33% for Obama).

In this post, I’m examining the issues that U.S. citizens care about, honing in on the differences between Obama and Romney promoters (consumers that are likely to recommend the candidate to their friends or relatives). We asked consumers about 11 different issues. As you can see in the infographic below:

• The most important issue for both Obama and Romney promoters is improving the U.S. economy and the bottom issue is the candidates’ religious views.
• Romney promoters view eight of the 11 issues as being more important than do Obama promoters; the only exceptions are the candidate’s positions on healthcare, gay marriage and abortion rights.
• The three issues that Romney promoters are more likely to see as important than Obama promoters are their position on U.S. relations with Israel (+26), their position on international terrorism (+16), and their religious views (+9).
• More consumers prefer Obama’s position across all of the issues, which is not surprising considering that Obama has a larger number of promoters.
• Consumers show the largest preference for Obama’s vision for the future of the U.S. and his position on healthcare (42%).
• Consumers show the largest preference for Romney for his plans to improve the U.S. economy (33%) and his position on healthcare (32%).
• U.S. consumers have the least preference when it comes to the candidates’ religious views.
• Obama supporters show more preference for Obama’s views than Romney’s promoters do for his views in 10 of the 11 issues; the only exception is their position on U.S. relations with Israel.
• Obama promoters show the largest preference gap when it comes to the candidates’ positions on abortion rights (+12) and gay rights (+10).

The bottom line: Consumers really care about the economy and a vision for the future