RALEIGH – The chief political races of 2004 are said to be about one primary issue: the American military intervention in Iraq.

Nonsense.

Elections are almost never “about” a single or primary issue. They are events that involve thousands or millions of individuals, each bringing a diversity of experiences and agendas to the process. The issue that matters most to some voters may lie far down the priority list for others – and neither preference can properly be viewed as better or more rational than the other.

You can see this dynamic clearly in election-year polls. When asked to name the most important political issue, or the one most likely to sway their vote, the plurality of respondents giving any particular answer rarely gets anywhere close to 50 percent. In North Carolina, for example, a recent poll for several Triangle-area news organizations found that the war on terror (24 percent), the economy (22 percent), homeland security (17 percent), Iraq (11 percent), health care (9 percent), moral issues (8 percent), and taxes and federal fiscal issues (8 percent) all claimed significant shares of the electorate’s attention. Asked about issues facing North Carolina, there was a more narrow set of priorities, but the four top choices all got sizable shares of interest: the economy (35 percent), taxes and state spending (23 percent), health care (19 percent), and education (18 percent).

Winning majorities are assembled like buffet plates. Candidates choose entrees, analogous to their respective partisan bases, and then seek to add slices of voters whose priorities may differ significantly from the partisans. In one sense, you might attribute a victor’s success in a tight race to any of a number of issues that moved a small group of voters and claim that it was a single issue that determined the outcome. But in a broader sense, this would be misleading.

There may be a few Americans who end up voting for Kerry or Bush on the basis of stem-cell research, or gun control, or their religious attendance, or college funding, or their disagreement over the Kyoto Protocol. If the November outcome is close, each might have a claim to be the decisive issue.

That’s why the slice of campaign life that was Monday, September 13 looked the way that it did. The president’s national security advisor, Condoleeza Rice, was in the Charlotte area talking up historically black colleges and Bush’s strategy against terrorism. On the other side of the state, in Greenville, HHS Secretary Tommy Thompson campaigned with Senate candidate Richard Burr on medical-malpractice reform. In the Triangle, US House Speaker Denny Hastert talked about job creation at an event for 13th District GOP candidate Virginia Johnson. Meanwhile, North Carolina’s John Edwards was in New Mexico attacking the president’s record on health care. And John Kerry was questioning Bush’s position on the expiration of a federal ban on assault-style rifles (though other Democrats were questioning Kerry’s questioning).

It does seem clear that two sets of issues — national security and economic challenges — claim the most attention. But it’s not possible to predict what specifically will tip the balance in presidential and congressional races. While there may be many single-issue voters, there are rarely single-issue races.

Hood is president of the John Locke Foundation and publisher of Carolina Journal.