Americans voted to elect Donald Trump as the 47th president Tuesday night’s election he expressed concern about several key issues, including the state of democracy, the economy, immigration and foreign policy.
In particular, the state of democracy was the most important issue for voters, with 35% saying so, according to an ABC News report. preliminary exit polland then 31% said that the economy was the most important issue.
Health care, however, did not appear to be a major voting issue for many Americans. Although abortion, for example, was among the top five voting issues, only 14% said it was their most important issue, according to exit polls.
Experts told ABC News that despite concerns about the repeal of the Affordable Care Act (ACA) and further restrictions on abortion rights, other issues were on the minds of Americans.
“Health care issues are always a concern for people, but there were certainly other issues that were more important to people at this time,” Dr. Perry Halkitis, dean of the Rutgers University School of Public Health in New Jersey, told ABC News. . “It seems like the economy and migration were the biggest issues, but mostly the economy. People expressed very serious concerns about prices, very serious concerns about the availability of things, very serious concerns about inflation.”
“And those trumped concerns about access to health care and reproductive rights, and many people voted based on their pockets instead of rights and access to health care,” Halkitis continued.
Former President Donald Trump and former first lady Melania Trump take the stage at an election night party on November 6, 2024 in West Palm Beach, Florida.
Evan Vucci/AP
Affordable Care Act
During his first term, then-President Trump tried several times to repeal the ACA, but was unsuccessful. was It is scheduled for the end of November 2023 to replace him, saying Republicans would “never give up” in the effort.
However, during 2024, Trump said on several occasions, both social networks and meanwhile presidential debatethat he wanted to make the ACA “better” than replace it.
After all, concerns about health care and potential changes to the ACA didn’t even crack the top five voting issues in ABC News’ exit polls.
Halkitis said he doesn’t think there will be any radical changes to the ACA in Trump’s second term because it is “into people’s lives.” However, he worries about legislation or policies that could limit the types of services available from health care providers, as opposed to fully repealing or dismantling the ACA.
“An example is in the state of Texas about a year ago the court decided that pre-exposure prophylaxisthat is, using a pill once a day to prevent HIV, it didn’t have to be covered by a certain company’s insurance,” Halkitis said. “I think things like that speak to people’s beliefs, whether right or wrong, (that) people are given health care. they can affect the types of services, if the president-elect wants to make changes to the Affordable Care Act.”
It is another example guarantee of federal contraceptive coverage. Under a provision of the ACA, most private insurance plans must cover the full cost of most contraceptives, such as birth control, without patients paying out-of-pocket costs.
If the incoming Trump administration allows employers and schools to use religious and moral exemptions to prevent contraceptive coverage, The White House did it In Trump’s first term, that could lead to higher out-of-pocket costs that make contraception unaffordable for some, some experts told ABC News.
Those with pre-existing conditions could also be at risk. Under the ACA, insurers cannot charge more or deny coverage to someone or their children because of a pre-existing health condition. However, Vice President JD Vance has done so propose Placing people with chronic conditions into separate risk groups, which can raise premiums for those with pre-existing conditions.
“I hope that doesn’t happen, because that would be really disastrous for millions of Americans,” Halkitis said. “What I think would happen is, if they changed the pre-existing conditions clause, and put people in a different bracket, it would make it unaffordable for people to have health insurance.”
Dr. Stephen Patrick, professor and chair of the Department of Health Policy and Management at the Rollins School of Public Health at Emory University in Georgia, said he believes voters will be motivated to vote in future elections if they see change. ACA
For example, Patrick said public opinion is generally favorable to provisions such as parents keeping their children in their insurance plans until age 26. The 2019 KFF Health Monitoring Survey has been foundto have encouraged people to vote in the past elections.
“We know that as you start making changes to things like the Affordable Care Act, people care as we start to change things, or we start to change things as it affects health insurance,” Patrick told ABC News. “If you tell someone ‘keep your kids on your health insurance until they’re 26,’ people are generally in favor of those types of policies.”
Reproduction rights
some the political strategists thought 2022 decision of the US Supreme Court Roe v. Wade annulment It would encourage voters who support abortion rights to vote for Kamala Harris. Trump himself took credit for the ruling, boasting “That Roe v. Wade was able to kill.”
A signature in support of Proposition 139, an abortion rights initiative, is displayed in the lobby of the Tucson headquarters of the Arizona List, an association to empower and elect progressive pro-choice Democratic women leaders, in Tucson, Arizona, on October 19. 16 of 2024
Olivier Touron/AFP via Getty Images, FILE
While supporters of legal abortion were deeply divided in favor of Harris, Trump’s focus on states’ rights resonated with voters who did not see abortion access as incompatible with a Trump presidency.
In Arizona, the 23% who voted “yes” to the initiative enshrining abortion rights in the state constitution also supported Trump. In Nevada, where another abortion-rights measure passed, 25% of “yes” voters also went for Trump, according to an ABC News poll.
“I think what we’re seeing (in the exit polls) is that abortion was a very important issue among many, many voters. However, not all of those voters voted for Kamala Harris,” Dr. Leslie Kantor, professor and president. Department of Global Urban Public Health at the Rutgers School of Public Health, told ABC News. “I think there was actually some confusion that the Trump-Vance campaign sowed quite deliberately in the last few weeks, trying to make people believe that they actually don’t oppose abortion, when the history of history clearly shows that they do.”
Kantor said that’s evident in the statements Trump and Vance said the president-elect would make veto the national abortion ban if he ran into his desk, or inside it the comments Trump said he would not use the 150-year-old The Comstock Act to ban the mailing of abortion drugs.
Kantor noted, Trump’s Roe v. While he boasted about appointing Supreme Court justices to overturn Wade, he said he spoke less about abortion rights during the campaign.
“In 2024, when people were seeing the dire consequences of the overturning (sic) of Roe v. Wade, he really backed away from that position and it was much less clear, and the voters clearly had less,” he said. “When you see somebody say, ‘I think abortion should be legal,’ and then vote for someone who clearly doesn’t think abortion should be legal, you know people are screwed.”
Preliminary ABC News poll results show abortion was an important voting issue for young women, with about 19 percent of all female voters saying it was their most important issue, rising to 42 percent among women under 30.
Kantor also stated that she believes young women are scared after reading the news about it women pushed to the brink of death or dying after being denied medical care because doctors hesitated to act due to restrictions on state abortion laws. She added that there are also some abortion care providers leaving states where abortion care is restricted.
“Young women are scared of what’s happening across the country,” Kantor said. “It’s true that in this country it’s not even safe to have a wanted pregnancy… So I think young women in their 30s, maybe 25s, having to manage their sexual and reproductive health with very few providers. very few rights.”
Abortion services can be difficult to access even in states where care is currently legal. in missouri voters received the right effectively ending the state’s restrictive prohibition on reproductive freedom in the state constitution. However, abortion is currently not available in the state.
“Access to services is incredibly limited and at some point having a right doesn’t make sense if you can’t actually get the service,” Kantor said.
ABC News’ Gary Langer and Gibran Okar contributed to this report.
