HPU Poll: North Carolinians Weigh In On National Issues Ahead of the State of the Union Address

The latest High Point University Poll asked North Carolinians questions on several national issues ahead of the State of the Union Address on Feb. 7.

The January 2023 HPU Poll memo captures how North Carolinians are feeling about these particular issues in our nation and globally:

- The direction of the country (Page 3)

- Approval of President Biden (Page 3), North Carolina Governor Roy Cooper (Page 5) and the U.S. Congress (Page 5)

- Favorability ratings (Page 6) on people, countries and institutions

- Importance of national issues (Page 7)

- Party ownership of those national issues (Page 9)

- Inflation’s effect on the prices of goods and services (Page 11)

- Confidence in U.S. elections and expectations for national political leadership (Page 15)

- COVID-19 and influenza, including concerns about variants from China (Page 17)

- Foreign affairs, including America’s place in the world and the war against Ukraine (Page 19)

The HPU Poll recently released the results on how North Carolinians feel about inflation in the state and the country, the approval ratings of our nation’s and state’s leaders, and opinions about the economy from the Consumer Sentiment Index.

The poll also screened the sample to report responses from self-identified registered voters and voters in the 2022 elections.

“We rarely see the leadership of all branches of government in the same place to hear a speech about issues of national importance,” said Dr. Martin Kifer, chair and associate professor of political science and the director of the HPU Poll. “The State of the Union Address is an annual opportunity for leadership of both parties and the country as a whole to listen to the President’s priorities and react to what he says. This poll gives us insight into how North Carolinians are feeling about national issues as the nation prepares for this event.”

Kifer is available leading up to the State of the Union Address to respond to any questions on the poll’s findings.

The most recent HPU Poll of 1,006 respondent was fielded by the High Point University Survey Research Center on Jan. 17 through Jan. 21, as an online survey using a panel of respondents recruited and maintained by Dynata. Dynata sent invitations to its panel of N.C. respondents and the SRC collected responses on its Qualtrics platform. The SRC did all data analysis. The online sample is from a panel of respondents, and their participation does not adhere to usual assumptions associated with random selection. Therefore, it is not appropriate to assign a classic margin of sampling error for the results. In this case, the SRC provides a credibility interval of plus or minus 3.3 percentage points to account for a traditional 95% confidence interval for the estimates (plus or minus 3.1 percentage points) and a design effect of 1.1 (based on the weighting). The data is weighted toward population estimates for age, gender, race/ethnicity and education based on U.S. Census numbers for North Carolina. Factors such as question wording and other methodological choices in conducting survey research can introduce additional errors into the findings of opinion polls.

Further results and methodological details from the most recent survey and past surveys can be found at the Survey Research Center website. The materials online include past press releases as well as memos summarizing the findings (including approval ratings) for each poll since 2010.

The HPU Poll reports methodological details in accordance with the standards set out by AAPOR’s Transparency Initiative, and the HPU Survey Research Center is a Charter Member of the Initiative.

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