Surveys of voters leaving the polls found that nearly half of Republican voters listed the economy as the most important issue in exit polls, while 21 percent said terrorism, 16 percent immigration and 14 percent the war in Iraq.
Four in 10 Republican voters said illegal immigrants working in the United States should be deported, while about 3 in 10 said they should be allowed to stay as temporary workers, and the same number said they should be offered a chance to apply for citizenship. Mr. McCain was supported by a plurality of those who favored citizenship, and Mr. Romney by those who favored deportation.
Hispanics, who made up more than one-tenth of the Republican voters, said they were more inclined to favor a guest-worker program over deportation. Forty-three percent of them said illegal immigrants should be allowed to remain in the United States as temporary workers, while one-third said they should be offered the opportunity to apply for citizenship. Only one-fifth of Hispanic Republicans said they favored deporting illegal immigrants.
Mr. McCain, who last spring supported the immigration proposal that would have created a guest-worker program and a path toward citizenship for illegal immigrants, won roughly half the Hispanic vote. Mr. Giuliani, who strongly courted Cuban-Americans in the Miami area, won about one-quarter of the Hispanic vote, and Mr. Romney, who took the hardest line on illegal immigration, finished a distant third.
