Who cares about mental health? Benchmarking the issue importance of mental health for American voters”

TL;DR

This study explores how important mental health is as a voting issue for American voters and finds it to be significant, especially among certain groups.

Contribution

The study introduces a novel approach to assess mental health as a political issue using experimental methods and a nationally representative sample.

Findings

Mental health is a substantial voting issue for Americans, comparable to other salient issues like border security and abortion.

Liberals, higher-income individuals, and those in poor health consider mental health especially important.

Prioritizing mental health policies could yield political benefits for policymakers.

Abstract

Existing scholarship on public opinion and mental health in the US has emphasized variations in Americans’ stated support for policies or investments intended to address mental health. This work has shown that overall support for these policies is quite high, suggesting that scholars of public opinion may be focusing on the wrong dependent variable. This study asks a different question: to what degree is mental health an important voting issue for Americans, and what groups consider it especially important? Using a high-quality nationally representative sample of 1000 American adults from the 2024 Cooperative Election Study, I use recently developed experimental methods to assess how important hypothetical candidates’ position on a mental health policy proposal (the Better Health Care for Americans Act) is to vote choice relative to nine other salient policy issues, including border security, abortion, and student loan forgiveness. The results suggest that mental health is of substantial importance, and especially so for liberals, higher-income people, and those in relatively poor health. These findings suggest that championing action on mental health could bring political rewards to policymakers.

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