With less than a year to go before the election, FiveThirtyEight’s staff members took a detailed look at seven issues we cover regularly, examining the positions of the presidential candidates and suggesting developments likely to arise before the voting takes place.

Education Only 4 percent of Americans consider education the nation’s most important problem, according to Gallup’s monthly polling, which may explain why we haven’t heard much about specific education policy from the presidential candidates. So far, the education subject the candidates have spoken about most often — college affordability — is one of the few things in the education sphere that most people can agree on, regardless of political affiliation. And it’s becoming more urgent. In a recent Gallup-Purdue poll, 50 percent of college graduates said they strongly believed their education was worth it, but that percentage shrank to 38 percent for those who graduated from 2006 to 2015. Nearly half of recent graduates with student loan debt have put off further education because of those loans; a third have delayed buying a house or car because of student loans, and nearly 20 percent have put off starting a business for the same reason. All of the Democratic candidates have made the high cost of college a key part of their campaigns, and many of the Republican candidates, including Ben Carson, Marco Rubio, Rand Paul and Chris Christie, have laid out their own plans for how to deal with the issue. Democratic candidates’ platforms focus on, among other things, either eliminating tuition (Hillary Clinton’s plan would make community college free, and Bernie Sanders’s would make all public colleges and universities free) or dramatically reducing it. Republican plans focus more on ways to encourage colleges to reduce their costs by accrediting nontraditional education or making colleges responsible for student loan interest. But the real fault line is likely to be K-12 education, particularly the Common Core curriculum and charter schools. A recent Education Next poll found that 57 percent of Democrats favor using the Common Core standards in their state, and only 37 percent of Republicans do. On charter schools, 56 percent of Republicans supported their formation, compared with 40 percent of Democrats. Thus far, the Democratic candidates have been relatively quiet on all things K-12, whereas the Republican field has been more vocal about things like the Common Core, school choice and the role of the federal government. One issue that has been gaining attention, especially since President Obama spoke about it two weeks ago, is the role of standardized testing. Voters in both major parties agree that it’s a problem: PDK/Gallup’s annual education poll found that 60 percent of Republicans and 71 percent of Democrats believe there’s too much emphasis on standardized testing in public schools. We haven’t heard much from the candidates on this issue yet, but if polling is any indicator of what they’ll focus on, it’s only a matter of time.