Well, it’s not news to ManufactureThis, but it seems ABC News found it quite surprising that “the economy” is top-of-mind for voters right now as they survey the 2008 presidential field. 

ABC and Facebook co-sponsored both the Republican and Democratic debates on Saturday night, and their viewer polls showed most voters wanting to hear more from the candidates about the economy.

Facebooks’s Bianna Golodryga, in discussing the 100,000 or so online responses said that they were “surprised…because still, just like the Republicans, the economy was a key issue here — 44 percent said the Democrats didn’t spend enough time talking about the economy. Health care followed that, by 13 percent.”

  A 44% plurality is a rather overwhelming statistic, and it yields a rather candid snapshot of America’s day-to-day worries. 

The post-mortem of the debates also revealed voters pessimism and job worries.  A full 27% of respondents said that they expect that the U.S. economy will be “very weak” in 2008, so it’s not surprising that so many viewers wished the economy had been discussed more.

For months, we’ve been actively pressing for more discussion of jobs, jobs, jobs.  In fact, if ManufactureThis had moderated the debate, you can bet we’d have asked what the various White House contenders would do to save U.S. manufacturing jobs. 

USA Today touched on this today when noting that the U.S. lost 31,000 manufacturing jobs in December 2007 despite a weakening dollar.  Reporter Sue Kirchhoff quoted AAM’s Scott Paul on the list of significant challenges, including rising energy and healthcare costs, facing the nation’s manufacturers.

ManufactureThis will keep pushing for an expanded discussion of the major economic issues of the day.  As Scott Paul said in USA Today, “We also have to look at this from a competition perspective, and our manufacturers are just getting hammered”—good analysis for both the press and presidential contenders.

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This entry was posted on Monday, January 7th, 2008 at 9:25 pm and is filed under Manufacturing in the U.S., Economic Security. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.