A new study shows that nearly 12 percent of Republican voters fall into the “shy voter” category, meaning they would be reluctant to disclose to pollsters their true preferences for who they would vote for in the presidential election and supporting the view that polls may not capture the full extent of support for President Donald Trump.
“The results could have implications in terms of the true accuracy of phone polls; if Republicans, Independents, and supporters of Donald Trump (regardless of party affiliation) are less likely to participate in polls or accurately disclose the candidate they support, that inherently generates biased poll outcomes,” wrote Leib Litman, Co-CEO and Chief Research Officer of CloudResearch, in a note explaining a key takeaway.
Litman said in the note that what drove the research was the lack of empirical evidence to support arguments in the current debate around whether there are segments of Trump backers who are reluctant to express their true opinions to pollsters. He explained the study was designed so as not “to fall into the same trap as other pollsters who tend to lead with preference declarations” and instead start by probing the level of comfort with sharing voter preferences truthfully in phone polls and incorporate those insights into presidential candidate preference conclusions.
The study also found that “[w]hen we broke the responses down based on current Trump vs Biden supporters, we found the following: 10.1 [percent] of Trump supporters said they were likely to be untruthful on phone surveys—double the number of Biden supporters (5.1 [percent]) reticent to share their true intentions,” Litman noted.
The findings reinforce the view that there may, indeed, be an underrepresentation of Trump supporters in polls and may go some ways to explaining Trump’s victory in 2016 under circumstances where polls conducted at the time widely projected his Democratic rival Hillary Clinton to win.
Trump and members of his campaign have repeatedly touted the phenomenon of “hidden” voters, which the president himself has referred to as the so-called “silent majority,” in arguing for the likelihood that he will surge ahead of Biden to secure his bid for reelection.
“It isn’t surprising that in this political climate of extreme division and hostility between the president’s followers and his opponents, there is some reticence to be forthcoming,” he wrote, arguing that the “shy” voter phenomenon is significant enough to conclude that polls putting Biden ahead of Trump are inaccurate.
