(Cross-posted from the Official YouTube Blog) 


With three days to go before the Fox News/Google Debate, we’ve seen more than 16,000 questions from all 50 states submitted to the Fox News YouTube channel. During Thursday’s live event in Orlando, you’ll see a selection of these questions posed to the GOP candidates live on stage. As we count down to tomorrow’s midnight ET submission deadline, here’s a look at the questions you want answered by the candidates bidding for the 2012 Republican nomination.

The top issues on your minds? The Government Spending & Debt and Jobs & Economy categories rank highest in question volume—not surprising with unemployment above 9 percent and a summer spent debating the debt ceiling. Health care, which dominated political chatter for the first year of Obama’s presidency, now trails all other issues.

* NOTE: This chart excludes the “Other” category, which has received 26% of all questions, ranging from education to State’s rights.

You also want to hear from specific candidates in the GOP field. Ten percent of the total questions received referenced a specific candidate, and of those, newcomer Gov. Rick Perry leads the pack. Outweighing all of the GOP candidates in mentions? President Obama. Questioners referenced the current president over 1,000 times, nearly twice as many times as Gov. Perry, and ten times as much as the previous president, George W. Bush.

Interest in the race spans the country and the globe, with questions submitted from Indiana to Israel, South Dakota to South Korea. In the US, the cities leading question submissions are:

Houston
Miami
New York
San Diego
Austin

It’s not too late to submit your own question, or vote on the ones you like, at www.youtube.com/foxnews. Then, on Thursday, watch the live debate unfold there at 9pm ET, and see how the candidates respond.

Posted by: Will Houghteling, YouTube News and Politics, recently watched “Flying over planet Earth.”