Shy Trump voters, Bigfoot, and other North American cryptids
The concept originates in the "shy Tory voter" in England who voted for the Conservatives and Boris Johnson in their last election despite telling pollsters that they were undecided or voting for Jeremy Corbin's Labour Party. And it's not hard to see why it might be tempting to import the concept. Hey, President Trump's victory in 2016 was a surprise to everybody. It's become conventional wisdom that "the polls were wrong" last time out. This, together with the concept of the "shy Trump voter," are the most common explanations for what happened.
In fact, Politico recently ran an interview with two pollsters who believe that "shy Trump voters" are being vastly overcounted and that because of that the result of the election will be much different than people generally expect. The Trafalgar Group, which has attracted attention for releasing state polls wildly different from those taken by every other pollster, brags that it was the only major pollster that correctly predicted the race in the three crucial states that threw the Electoral College to Trump in 2016. And the 2020 results on which Trafalgar's Robert Cahaly bases his conclusions lose all credibility when they're examined in detail. Consider this example, from a recent Trafalgar poll in Pennsylvania:
Trafalgar, like Rasmussen, is a Republican pollster that uses a methodology that consistently yields results significantly more favorable to Republicans than the average of all pollsters. Trafalgar notes a phenomenon other pollsters have also remarked upon: a disconnect between who voters say that they themselves are going who they think their neighbors are going to vote for. And that rather unscientific observation is part of the basis upon which Cahaly constructs his concept of the "shy" Trump voter.
On the plus side, Trafalgar did a far better job than most pollsters of making sure to include non-college-educated white males in their poll last time. As a result, they were able to accurately predict state races which were decided by that demographic far better than other pollsters. This time, pollsters generally have corrected that fault; whether they've corrected it enough, of course, remains to be seen. But the difference between Trafalgar's results and those reached by all the other polls certainly raises an eyebrow, especially when one takes the often bizarre details into account.
The other pollster in the interview, Arie Kapteyn of USC, represents another poll that corrected for education. But the USC poll was even more wrong than pollsters generally! It had Trump winning the popular vote by three points! While these men repeat talking points commonly made by supporters of the "shy Trump voter" theory, they offer little concrete reason to believe that the polls generally are as wrong as they claim this time out. And there are reasonable grounds for taking the conclusions both of them reach with several grains of salt.
Further, contrary to common belief the polls generally weren't all that wrong in 2016. They overestimated Hillary's vote on average by one percent, which was well within most polls' margin of error. Where they really blew it, it was mostly in three Midwestern states. True, non-college-educated white men were undersampled. Attempts have been made by the mainstream polls to correct that flaw, but they still may be undercounting them. But more than anything else, Donald Trump is president today because of a freak distribution of a very small number of voters in exactly the right states to give him a majority in the Electoral College despite losing the popular vote by two percent. Nearly everybody got it wrong in 2016 because of an unlikely accident of geography, not because the polls turned out to be all that inaccurate.
Nate Silver's FiveThirtyEight did a podcast a while back which touched, among other things, on what they regard as the myth of the "shy Trump voter." Silver released another podcast on the subject yesterday. He makes several salient points.
First, Cahaly and Kapteyn's theory that Trump voters lied to posters In 2016 out of embarrassment- the concept of "social acceptability bias-" crumbles the moment one examines the details of the actual result. The consensus of the polls underestimated the Trump vote more in red states- where it would be more socially problematic to vote for Hillary than for Trump- than in blue states. "Social acceptability bias" was simply not a factor. In the states where the distortion showed up most clearly, people would be more logically motivated to be "shy" Clinton voters than "shy" Trump voters.
Sure, people lie to pollsters, and the more paranoid one is about pollsters and conspiracies and the "Deep State" and so forth, the more likely they are to support Trump rather than Clinton or Biden. But how paranoid would you have to be to lie anonymously to a person on the phone about how you're going to vote, or to think that records are being kept of the responses you personally give? Sure, conspiracy theorists are more common among the President's supporters than among Joe Biden's, and so they're more likely to be suspicious about pollsters and more reluctant to tell them the truth. But especially since the polls got it most seriously wrong last times in the red states, where most people were for Trump, is it really that more likely that they would be more reluctant to admit being for Trump than, say, Biden voters in those same states would be reluctant to admit being for Biden?
Are Trump voters ashamed to be voting for Trump? Maybe. But outside of overwhelmingly liberal circles, would Trump supporters really be likely to see supporting Trump as something embarrassing or shameful? Just how shy is your average Trump voter, anyway? How concerned is he about what other people think of his support of Mr. Trump?
"Shy" is not the first adjective that comes to mind when thinking about red hat-wearing, non-mask-wearing, rally-attending MAGA type. And all these things being true, other than as a way to keep a glimmer of hope alive in the face of an overwhelming body of consistent evidence that a historically unpopular President who has literally never exceeded a popularity rating of 50% is going to be denied a second term, the concept simply doesn't make a lot of sense here, whatever may have happened in England.
It's become axiomatic that Democrats are suffering from PTSD as a result of 2016. Despite the strength of the evidence, few Biden supporters are confident that their man is going to win on Tuesday. Could something like 2016 happen again? Of course.
But it probably won't. There are too many things about 2020 that are different from 2016 and militate against another upset. To begin with, the 2016 election was between two historically unpopular candidates. There was a huge number of undecided voters, almost all of whom went to Trump.
That makes sense, actually; late undecideds almost always break strongly against the candidate of the incumbent party. Last time that was the Democrats; this time, it's the Republicans. But besides that, while Trump is unpopular with voters generally, Biden isn't. And there are remarkably few undecided voters this time out. That's one reason why the race has been remarkably stable all year. Although Trump never appeared likely to win, the race in 2016 was remarkably volatile.
And then, there's the question of the relative size of the Democrats' lead. The final polls in 2016 gave Hillary an average lead of 2.8%; the Real Clear Politics average at the moment gives Biden a lead of 7.8%, Explain 2016 however you want to, but the fact remains that if the polls are as wrong in 2020 by the same margin that they were wrong in 2016, Biden still defeats Trump by a solid five points.
Could Trump still win? Of course. Could there be a hidden reservoir of "shy Trump voters" who will propel him to yet another Electoral College upset? Certainly. And Bigfoot and the Loch Ness Monster may be real, too.
But the bottom line, as Silver points out in that second podcast, is that there simply isn't much more reason to believe in the existence of the "shy Trump voter" than there is to believe in Bigfoot.
Unless, of course, somebody really, really wants to.
ADDEMDUM, early morning, November 4: I was wrong.
"Shy Trump voters" turned out to be all too real. A large number of our fellow Americans are embarrassed by the way they voted yesterday, and were ashamed to admit it to the pollsters.
As they bloody well should have been.
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