More than one in five Americans say the presidential candidates' policies on housing and finance will shape their vote in November, according to the results of a survey conducted for loanDepot.
Altogether, 21% of survey respondents said that these policies will influence their choice of candidate, loanDepot reported Wednesday. But 36% of survey-takers said that the presidential candidates are not articulating their policies in these areas well.
Nevertheless, folks across the country are hungry for more: 35% of respondents said they want to hear more from the candidates on housing and finance, and that figure rose to 56% for Democrats and 39% for Republicans.
"People across the nation told us they want to hear more from the presidential candidates about their housing and financial policies on issues like income, access to credit, interest rates and affordable housing," loanDepot Chairman and Chief Executive Anthony Hsieh said in the release.
"The candidate who does a good job in communicating their policies moving forward has an opportunity to influence millions of potential voters."
Regarding the next president's first 100 days in office, 37% of respondents said increasing the affordability of homeownership for lower- and middle-income families ranked as the top economic or housing priority to be addressed. Next was keeping interest rates low, 34%, and increasing the availability of credit to small businesses, 11%.
Nearly half of both Democrats and Republicans also responded that they wanted interest rates to remain low during the first 100 days of the next president's term.
As for voters' expectations of how the next president would affect their financial situation, 66% said they expected their situation to remain the same while 24% believe they will be worse off. Just 6% of voters expect the next president to improve their financial situation.
But loanDepot noted in the survey that voters' perceptions don't always align with reality. Case in point: 38% of respondents said they think it is harder to get a home loan today than it was immediately after the financial crisis. But as loanDepot notes, citing data from the Federal Reserve, denial rates for purchase loan applications reached 18% in 2008 versus 13% in 2014, the most recent year for which data is available.
The survey was conducted by Omniweb and included 1,000 adults, split evenly between men and women.
