I'd heard about this survey a while back. And now, it's done.

Hat tip to Tyler Cowen for alerting me to the results.

I am actually as surprised as Cowen, a libertarian independent like me, that the polls were as close as they were on a general level considering the personal politics of Economists to skew "liberal" (despite that, as a group, those liberals tend to skew "Right" compared to others in Academia)

Obama won the general vote by a count of 59% to 31%.

The breakdown of the participants was:

48 percent -- Democrats

17 percent -- Republicans

27 percent -- Independents

3 percent -- Libertarian

5 percent -- Other or not registered

See the CNN story on the matter for some breakdowns on specific in order of importance to economists.

You can find detailed survey data at the Dilbert Blog where you'll see a power point link.

Some tidbits from the data:

Voting preference is 66% for Obama and 28% for McCain and 6% for someone else (Barr? Paul?)

27% were very familiar with McCain economic proposals and 90% were at least somewhat familiar
Those who favor McCain are more likely to be somewhat familiar with his proposals (69% vs. 61%). Those very familiar were 25% in favor of McCain and 27% opted for Obama. IOW, of those who favored McCain, 94% were at least somewhat familiar with him. For those who favored Obama, 88% were at least somewhat familiar with McCain.

30% were very familiar with Obama's economic proposals and 91% were at least somewhat familiar. For those who favored McCain, 87% were at least somewhat familiar with Obama. For those who favored Obama, 90% were at least somewhat familiar with Obama. The numbers for those very familiar with Obama were as follows: 25% of those favoring McCain and 31% of those favoring Obama.

The averaged top four issues overall ( given at least an "8" on a 1-10 scale by at least 60% of economists) were:

Education, Health Care, International Trade and Energy

By breakdown of those favoring McCain and Obama, the priorities were as follows:

McCain supporters:

Trade 73%
Education 64%
Social Security 63%
Tech and Innovation 58%
Iraq, Afghan. Security 49%
Reducing waste 48%
Health Care 45%
Energy 42%
Immigration 42%

For Obama Supporters:

Health Care 77%
Education 74%
Energy 70%
Iraq, Afghan, Security 63%
Environment 61%
Mortgage crisis 59%
Tech Innovation 59%
International Trade 57%

Interesting Breakdown by Candidate preference. I would assume those priorities reflect a combination of personal concern and the magnitude of influence they see from policy.

My top three are Trade, Education and Health Care with close 4th to Energy Policy.

The biggest gaps in priorities between the 2 groups of economists are in order on: taxes, waste, environment, SS, Health Care and Energy.

The survey also notes that Obama-favoring economists put an importance of "8" on 14 of the 20 total issues. And those who very familiar with candidates put higher importance on more issues than those less familiar.

When asked which candidate would be better on the highest priority issues ("No difference" [ND] was also a choice):
1. Health care: Obama 65%, McCain 20%, ND 15%
2. Trade: McCain 51%, Obama 26%, ND 23%
3. Education Obama 59%, McCain 14%, ND 27%
4. Energy Obama 61%, McCain 22%, ND 17%

Down the list, a bit, I found it interesting that Mortgage/Housing Crisis was a tie at 41% each with the rest saying ND.

The charts further down start to break down the issues by party affiliation and so on. Very interesting.

There were a total of 523 Interviews. Overall, 344 prefer Obama, 146 prefer McCain, 33 were neither.
251 were Democrats, 88 were republicans, 144 were Independents