Because Americans have come to prefer political echo chambers, it's important to looks at the polls in order to see what Americans truly care about.
It's just as important, after looking at the polls, to understand why.

Let's start with Gallup.

A several things stand out.
One is dissatisfaction with the government.
Another is race relations/racism. On liberal blogs such as DKos, this issue is overrepresented in comparison to the general public.

The last issue to stand out is the economy.
On first glance it appears important, but not all that important. But once you look at the other categories such as "Unemployment jobs", "Lack of money", "Wage issues", "Poverty/Hunger/Homelessness", "cost of living", etc. you realize that these all roughly fit into "personal economic/financial worries". Combined they dominate the worried minds of the voters.
You can see this duplicated by a CBS/NY Times poll.

In fact, if you look at pretty much every single poll going all the way back to the beginning of modern polling, economic concerns are almost always at the top. It's pretty much a given in American politics.
So it would be political suicide for a politician for national or statewide office to not emphasize his/her economic agenda for how to fix the economy.

It's not hard to understand why this remains true.
30% of Americans have no savings at all.
While 76% of Americans are living paycheck-to-paycheck.
These numbers have been roughly the same through multiple surveys this year.

That means that 3/4 of Americans are just one medical emergency or car repair away from disaster. No wonder it would be foremost on people's minds.
The numbers don't look much better when you look at older Americans.

While we may all have dreams about how we’d like to spend our retirement years – fishing, golfing, writing that great American novel – the truth is that as many as half of all households with Americans 55 and older have no retirement savings at all . Nothing. Zip. Nada. Not a dime.

What do you think all these older Americans are thinking about when they lay awake in bed? And if you look at minorities, this is doubly true.

The same is true when you look at minority groups, she adds: only 20% of Latinos have retirement accounts containing more than $10,000; 75% of African-Americans are in the bottom quartile when it comes to retirement assets.

Since blacks and latinos are generally poorer than white America, it would only make sense that they would be more worried about the economy.

That household finances are strained nearly to the breaking point for probably three out of four people reading this shouldn't be a surprise, because household incomes and household wealth are both way, way down from 2007.


In fact, most Americans have seen no real recovery since 2009. This is even more true for black Americans, who are worse off now than in 2009 by every economic metric, including the wealth gap between blacks and whites in America, which hit a 24-year high last year.

Democrats should keep that in mind when they are tempted to say something like, "The economy is doing much better" or "The economy is having a strong recovery". Because more often than not the person you are talking to is not doing well financially, and it is only natural that they are not going to want to hear that.
For someone who is just scraping by, the normal, healthy response to those statements would be "Oh yeah, well F U".

This applies even more for the few select people online who have referred to economic concerns as "pet economic issues". Because of the political echo chamber, they don't realize that they are in a small minority.

If you want to know why this is important to keep in mind, just Google "George H. W. Bush" and "economy" and "out of touch", and then Google "Clinton" and "It's the economy, stupid".