New polling indicates Republicans hold an edge on gun policy headed into the midterms, but that might not help them much.

A Reuters/Ipsos poll released on Monday found 35 percent of Americans said the GOP has a better plan for handling “gun violence and gun control,” which is three points more than said the same for Democrats. Still, guns ranked near the bottom of a list of Americans’ biggest concerns in an Economist/YouGov poll released the same day. It found just 2 percent of American adults said guns were the most important issue to them.

However, the Reuters/Ipsos poll indicates Republicans’ advantage on gun policy jumps by a point to 39/34 when considering just responses from registered voters. The advantage appears to stem primarily from 79 percent of Republicans backing their party’s approach to firearms regulation while only 74 percent of Democrats back their party. The poll found independents evenly split between the two parties on the issue, but that they were also most likely not to pick one or the other.

The pair of polls provide new insight into how voters are thinking about guns headed into November’s midterm elections. Though Republicans maintain an advantage on the issue, it continues to fall on the lower end of the spectrum. The polls, while limited in scope, indicate the issue is unlikely to have a strong effect on the overall election outcome — though, it could still affect some key races decided by slimmer margins.

Few polls have directly asked voters about gun policy in recent months. For instance, between January and May, The New York Times tracked 240 polls measuring President Donald Trump’s approval rating. Out of those, only one directly asked respondents about their thoughts on guns or gun policy. A YouGov survey of 2,226 adults from January 16th through the 22nd found Trump was 12 points underwater on his performance on gun policy. Given that he was only above water on his handling of border security in that poll, his performance on guns ranked around the middle of the pack.

Issue importance polling that includes gun policy has been at least somewhat more prolific over that time. And it has consistently shown that Americans don’t rank guns near the top of their list for most important issues. The Economist/YouGov finding that only two percent rate guns as their top issue is identical to what a poll from Quinnipiac University and another from the Economist/YouGov found in May. 

A historic decline in the murder rate over the past several years, as well as a drop in mass shootings, may help explain why guns aren’t rating near the top of the most important issues, as they often do after high-profile attacks or periods of national unrest. Eugene Volokh, a Senior Fellow at Stanford’s Hoover Institution who has written extensively on gun policy at his publication The Volokh Conspiracy, pointed to the potency of crime as an issue to possibly explain why guns aren’t at the top of mind for many. He noted the Economist/YouGov poll found crime was just one point ahead of guns on the most important issue list.

“But the polls report – surprisingly to me – that crime isn’t one of Americans’ biggest concerns, either,” Professor Volokh told The Reload. “If Americans aren’t that worried about crime, it’s hard to see why they’d be that worried about guns in particular.”

Meanwhile, the Reuters/Ipsos poll also found that Americans are most concerned about the economy, unemployment, and weakening democracy. 17 percent of survey participants ranked those as the top issues facing the country. The second most common answer was “threats to democratic values and norms,” with 14 percent of poll takers believing this to be the biggest issue in the nation. Reuters and Ipsos reported a total of 14 issues concerning Americans in the poll findings, but gun policy was not one of them. 

Corruption also ranked highly on the list, with 11 percent of respondents claiming it is the most important problem facing the US at the moment. 

The Economist/YouGov poll from July saw similar results. It found inflation/prices was the top issue, with 27 percent of respondents listing it as most important. That was followed by 14 percent who said jobs and the economy were most important.

The Reuters/Ipsos poll was conducted on 1,248 adults between July 24-26, 2026, with a margin of error of 2.9 percent among all respondents and 3.2 percent among registered voters. The Economist/YouGov poll was conducted between July 25th and 27th among 2,086 adults. It has a margin of error of 3.3 percent.