Modern societies face many important problems. Political parties and their politicians are required to address these problems and provide solutions. However, they have limited resources and need to make choices between problems. This raises the question which problems parties and their politicians pay attention to and why? We report from a pre-registered large-scale randomized field experiment conducted on a sample of more than 6,000 party candidates in the Danish local election in November 2021. Candidates randomly received an e-mail invitation to read a report about one of two societal problems (climate change and public schools) highlighting one of four content aspects (public opinion, party positions, media reporting, and statistical indicators). We estimate effects with an intention-to-treat analysis and our results show that party candidates are equally likely to engage with reports about statistical indicators and public opinion (about 27% of candidates in the two conditions). The level of problem attention in the remaining conditions featuring party positions and media reporting is -2.5 [95% CI: -5.6 to 0.6] and -3.6 [95% CI: -6.7 to -1.5] percentage points lower compared to the statistical indicator condition. We further show that the more obtrusive problem public schools increases attention by 3.7 [95% CI: 1.5 to 5.8] percentage points compared to climate change. We are currently scheduling interviews with candidates to get a deeper understanding of their attention to problems. Our study makes an important contribution to understanding the reasoning of political parties and their politicians in addressing and solving societal problems