‘People Are Going To Be Shocked’: Return of the
‘Shy’ Trump Voter?
In 2016, pollsters Arie Kapteyn and Robert Cahaly saw
Trump coming. In 2020, they see polls again underestimating his support.
Donald
Trump
POLITICO
illustration/Getty Images
By ZACK
STANTON
10/29/2020
04:55 PM EDT
Zack
Stanton is digital editor of Politico Magazine.
With Nov. 3
racing toward us, it can be tempting to see the 2020 election as a done deal.
For months, Joe Biden has consistently and convincingly led Donald Trump in
polls. Swing states in the industrial Midwest and Sun Belt appear to be heading
Biden’s way, and if you trust the polls, it’s not a leap to imagine him winning
330+ electoral votes.
But what if
you shouldn’t trust the polls?
In 2016,
months of national polls confidently showed Hillary Clinton ahead, and set many
Americans up for a shock on Election Night, when the Electoral College tilted
decisively in Trump’s favor. Two pollsters who weren’t blindsided by this are
Arie Kapteyn and Robert Cahaly. Kapteyn, a Dutch economist who leads the USC’s
Dornsife Center for Economic and Social Research, oversaw the USC/Los Angeles
Times poll that gave Trump a 3-point lead heading into election day—which,
Kapteyn notes, was wrong: Clinton won the popular vote by 2 points. Cahaly, a
Republican pollster with the Trafalgar Group, had preelection surveys that
showed Trump nudging out Clinton in Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, Florida
and North Carolina—all of which he won.
This year,
both men believe that polls could again be undercounting Trump’s support. The
reason is “shy” Trump voters—people reluctant to share their opinions for fear
of being judged. Though the “shy voter” idea is thrown around a lot by both
Trump supporters and Democratic skeptics, Kapteyn and Cahaly have specific
insights into why, and how, Trump support might be going undetected.
For Cahaly,
those votes are likely to make the difference again. “There’s a lot of hidden
Trump votes out there,” he says. “Will Biden win the popular vote? Probably.
I’m not even debating that. But I think Trump is likely to have an Electoral
College victory.”
As an
illustration, Kapteyn described what his team at USC sees in its polls. Beyond
simply asking voters whether they support Biden or Trump, USC asks a
“social-circle” question—“Who do you think your friends and neighbors will vote
for?”—which some researchers believe makes it easier for people to share their
true opinions without fear of being judged for their views.
“We
actually get a 10-point lead, nationally, for Biden over Trump” when asking
voters who they personally plan to support, says Kapteyn. “But if you look at
the ‘social-circle’ question, Biden only gets like a 5- or 6-point lead. … In
general—and certainly on the phone—people may still be a little hesitant to say
to that they’re Trump voters.”
“We live in
a country where people will lie to their accountant, they’ll lie to their
doctor, they’ll lie to their priest,” says Cahaly. “And we’re supposed to
believe they shed all of that when they get on the telephone with a stranger?”
This year,
conventional pollsters say they’ve learned their lessons, and are accounting
for factors that skewed their results last year. Kapteyn and Cahaly aren’t so
sure, as they explained to POLITICO this week via Zoom. A transcript of that
conversation is below, condensed and edited for length and clarity.
Election
Day is next week. National polling averages show Biden leading Trump by around
9 points. In 2016, averages had Clinton up by around 3 points, but you both ran
polls that showed Trump winning the presidency. What do you see this year?
Robert
Cahaly, the Trafalgar Group: Well first, we don’t do national polls, and that’s
for the same reason I don’t keep up with hits in a baseball game: It’s an
irrelevant statistic. But the battleground-state polls are a little closer
[than the national polls], and there’s a lot at play. People are going to be
shocked. A lot of people are going to vote this year who have been dormant or
low-propensity voters. I think it’s going to be at an all-time high.
The models
of who’s going to turn out this year are very flawed. What type of person comes
out for Trump? They’re not a normal election participant. They’re a
low-propensity voter. We included them in all of our surveys in fall 2016, and
we are including them now.
“People are going to be shocked. A lot of people are
going to vote this year who have been dormant or low-propensity voters. I think
it’s going to be at an all-time high.”
Robert Cahaly
Relying on
live callers for polls is especially bad in this modern era, where “social
desirability bias” is in full play. People avoid awkward conversations. So when
a person you don’t know calls and asks how you feel about Donald Trump—and you
don’t know how they feel—you tend to give them an answer that you think will
make them look at you in the best light. We’ve seen it year after year, and I
think it is very much at play this year.
Polls are
undercounting the people who don’t want to give their real opinions. If they
had corrected anything, why didn’t they see Ron DeSantis winning in his 2018
race for governor in Florida? They made the exact same mistake with his
opponent, Andrew Gillum. [The final RealClearPolitics polling average in that
race had Gillum up by 3.6 percentage points. DeSantis won by 0.4 percentage
points.] This wasn’t some random state’s race; this was the hottest,
meanest—neck-and-neck races for governor and senator in Florida in an off-year
election. Every single major player was polling that state. And 100 percent of
them got it wrong; we got it right.
Arie
Kapteyn, USC Dornsife Center for Economic and Social Research: First, let me
start with a qualification about our results four years ago. It looked as if we
did a good job because our national poll had Trump winning. But that, of
course, was wrong: In the popular vote, Trump actually lost. So we didn’t do
that well, and the reason why was our sample had an overrepresentation of people
in rural states. Even though we weighted by education and past voting
participation and all of that, we simply had too many Trump voters in the
sample.
We have
about 9,000 people in our panel [this year], and they answer questions every
two weeks. And we ask them a number of things. We ask the probability that they
will vote. We ask them the probability they’ll vote for Biden or Trump or
someone else. But we now also ask them a question I think you’d always asked,
Robert: “Who do you think your friends and neighbors will vote for?” We call it
a “social-circle” question.
“We actually get a 10-point lead, nationally, for
Biden over Trump. But if you look at the “social-circle” question, Biden only
gets like a 5- or 6-point lead.”
Arie Kapteyn
Now, we
actually get a 10-point lead, nationally, for Biden over Trump. But if you look
at the “social-circle” question, Biden only gets like a 5- or 6-point lead. One
explanation for that may indeed be “social desirability.” In general—and
certainly on the phone—people may still be a little hesitant to say to that
they’re Trump voters.
Cahaly: I
have many problems with polling today. It’s outdated. Part of it is they can’t
concede that this model of long questionnaires, small sample sizes and
exclusively live callers—I mean, they’re attacking the guys putting up
telegraph wires, but they’re running the Pony Express.
People are
busier than ever, and long questionnaires reduce the ability of average people
to participate. Who has time to answer 22 questions on a Tuesday night when
you’re trying to fix dinner or put your children to bed? Nobody. You end up
with people on the ideological extremes—either very conservative or very
liberal—or, worse: people who are bored.
“They’re attacking the guys putting up telegraph
wires, but they’re running the Pony Express.”
Robert Cahaly
We give
[respondents] lots of different ways to participate—online, by text or email.
You get one of our text polls at 7 p.m., and you can flip through it while
watching TV, or answer Question 1 at 9 p.m. and answer Question 2 the next
morning. That’s fine! We give you the time to participate on your schedule. We
make it very easy. It takes less than three minutes if you do it all at once.
Kapteyn: We
have an Internet panel, but it’s a little different from most others. We
recruit our respondents by sending them letters. We buy addresses from the post
office—or from a vendor—draw randomly from addresses in the United States,
invite people to participate in our studies and we pay them really well. We pay
them join, and then $20 for a 30-minute interview. We have a relationship of
trust with them.
I agree
that telephone polling in the traditional way, as far as I can tell, is pretty
close to death. You get extremely low response rates, and there is this issue:
Who is still answering the phone?
That’s a
thing [our surveys] don’t really suffer from as much, because these people
typically answer questions that aren’t about politics. We ask them about their
health or their finances. We give them cognitive tests. We do all sorts of
scientific work. We get them to wear accelerometers and we measure their
physical activity. Because they participate in all of this, they’re probably
less likely to be extreme—although if they had no interest in politics, they
might not participate.
You both
spoke with POLITICO after the 2016 election. Back then, you said that one of
the big things polling missed was “shy” Trump voters. In retrospect, do you
still think that’s the case, or was there something else at play?
Kapteyn: We
actually did a little experiment during the 2016 election: If you get called
for a survey, and a live person asks who you’re going to vote for, do you
answer that question differently than if you’d received the question in a
letter and mailed it back, or answered the survey online?
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We found
some evidence that being called up by someone you don’t know makes people more
hesitant to reveal their voting preference. And if you looked at whether these
were Trump or Clinton voters, you did see that those people who told us they
were Trump supporters were more likely to say they would not share their
preference if they got called on the phone. So that at least suggests that
there was a “shy Trump voter” phenomenon in 2016. Whether that’s the case this
year, I really have absolutely no idea. We haven’t looked at that, and I just
don’t know.
Cahaly: I
believe it was prevalent. In 2016, the worst being said about Trump voters is
that they were “deplorable.” 2020 is a whole different ballgame. It is worse
this time—significantly worse. This year had more things where you can get
punished for expressing an opinion outside the mainstream than almost any year
I can think of in modern history.
I’m finding
that people are very hesitant [to share their preference for Trump], because
now it’s not just being called “deplorable.” It’s people getting beat up for
wearing the wrong hat, people getting harassed for having a sticker on their
car. People just do not want to say anything.
“In 2016, the worst being said about Trump voters is
that they were ‘deplorable.’ 2020 is a whole different ballgame.”
Robert Cahaly
We talk to
lots of people in our surveys. And I hear things like, “Yeah, I’m for Trump, my
neighbors are for Trump, but there’s one neighbor who just hates Trump. And
when he walks his dog, he kind of wrinkles his nose by those houses, and I
don’t want him to do it at my house, so I don’t put a Trump sign. I like the
guy, and I don’t want him mad at me.” I hear stuff like that all the time.
People are playing their cards close to their chest because there’s a stigma to
being for Trump. What happens when the stigma rolls away from people who hide
their vote, and they start admitting where they are? This is what I think is
going to happen on Election Day.
Now,
there’s certain people who are vocal Trump supporters. To me, it has more to do
with your personality. Are you the kind of person who avoids awkward
conversations, or are you the kind of person who enjoys them? If you enjoy
them, and you’re for Trump, you’ll tell everybody. You’ll be in a boat parade!
But if you’re the kind of person who’s quiet and non-confrontational, you
aren’t going to say anything. And a lot of those people live in the Midwest.
They’re very regular, down-to-earth folks who are kind and deferential.
Robert, I’m
from the Midwest—Macomb County, Michigan, the home of the “Reagan Democrats,”
which voted for Obama twice then flipped to Trump. When you go there, you see
tons of Trump flags in people’s yards or waving from their trucks, reading,
“Trump 2020: No More Bullshit.” It’s difficult for me to believe that people
who are not shy about expressing their support for Trump in pretty much every
other instance are shy when—
Cahaly: But
they’re different people! Think about what you just said, because that’s the
reason why other Trump supporters are shy: The soccer mom doesn’t want to say
she’s for Trump because she doesn’t want you to think she’s one of them. You
just made my point for me! That’s exactly it! [Laughs]
This is
probably a horrible example, but there are a lot more people who like
professional wrestling than admit it. There are lots of fans who don’t want you
to think they’re like the other people who like professional wrestling.
“There are a lot more people who like professional
wrestling than admit it.”
Robert Cahaly
Kapteyn:
The only point I would make is that it seems that over the years, increasingly,
political preferences are localized. One county, one area is safe Democratic;
the other area is Republican. If you’re in the minority—you’re a Democrat in a
Republican area, or a Republican in a Democratic area—civil political
discussions have sort of ceased to exist. People become careful in expressing
their political preference if they feel that their whole neighborhood has a
different opinion.
In that
sense, I think there will be some symmetry in shyness, at least in sort of
day-to-day conversations. It’s not the same as answering the phone to someone
you have never talked to, but there is a lot of evidence that suggests people
are careful expressing their opinions if they feel they are in the minority.
Cahaly:
Absolutely true. It doesn’t matter whether it’s in a family or a company,
people do not like talking about politics when they feel like their opinion is
in the minority.
“There is a lot of evidence that suggests people are
careful expressing their opinions if they feel they are in the minority.”
Arie Kapteyn
Robert,
after the 2016 election, you told POLITICO that you didn’t buy the idea that
there were shy Clinton voters.
Cahaly: I
don’t.
Do you
believe there are shy Biden voters?
Cahaly: No.
And not because it’s just for Republicans. For example, had Bernie Sanders been
the nominee and been beat up every day as being socialist, there would be a
tremendous “shy” vote among moderate-to-conservative Democrats who would vote
for him as their nominee, but who may not want to tell people.
It depends
on the polarization of the figure. Nobody looks at Joe Biden and says, “Oh,
it’s toxic to be for him. People say Biden supporters are pond scum.” Nobody
says that. Nobody does that. It’s really about the stigma you get for
supporting the person.
Kapteyn:
This is why I feel that using the Internet [for surveys]—in the way we do
it—may help us a little bit. If someone on the Internet checks the box for
Trump, no one is going to yell at them.
If someone
is shy about their views, how do you measure that? You mentioned using online
surveys rather than live phone calls. But how do you actually measure the
existence of a group of people who won’t give you their opinions? How do you
know they exist?
Kapteyn:
Partly, you ask, “What do your neighbors think?” or “What your friends think?”
That’s an indirect way of eliciting opinions.
Generally,
if you do surveys, people give you all sort of wrong answers. In cases where
you can verify it, you’ll find that there are very systematic biases. For
example, one of the things we do at USC is we measure people’s physical
activity—how active they are, how often they do sports. And I’ve done
international comparative work on this. If you ask about it, Americans are just
as active as the Dutch or the English. But if you measure it—
Cahaly:
[Laughter] I love it.
Kapteyn:
—you get a Fitbit, and sure enough, you notice an enormous difference. This is
not unique to political polling; there is a general issue with asking questions
and what to do with the answers.
Cahaly: I
couldn’t agree more. We live in a country where people will lie to their
accountant, they’ll lie to their doctor, they’ll lie to their priest. And we’re
supposed to believe they shed all of that when they get on the telephone with a
stranger and become Honest Abe? I cannot accept that.
Now, how we
measure it is a little different. We find questions that are less
confrontational. We brought the “neighbor” question into the mainstream, but I
got that from a man named Rod Shealy, who’s since passed. I learned a lot from
him doing politics in South Carolina. He always said that people are real
polite, so when you need to know what they think about something that’s not
pleasant to talk about, ask them what their neighbors think, because they’ll
give you their real opinion without you judging them for it.
“We live in a country where people will lie to their
accountant, they’ll lie to their doctor, they’ll lie to their priest. And we’re
supposed to believe they shed all of that when they get on the telephone with a
stranger and become Honest Abe?”
Robert Cahaly
This year,
we’re asking a series of other questions that are easy and don’t seem like
you’re going to get judged harshly for answering them. Our first goal is to
minimize the social desirability effect. And you do that by giving them a great
sense of anonymity. The more anonymous they think they are when giving answers,
the more honest they tend to be.
It’s kind
of like the people who have two Twitter accounts—the one where they tweet out
pictures of their pets and children, and one where they just go give everybody
a fit. Well, that “troll” account is their real emotion. And the persona that
runs that troll account is the one in the ballot booth. That’s who I’m trying
to get to.
The results
in 2016 really hurt people’s willingness to trust polls. You’re seeing it now:
Democrats say, “Biden is leading, but the polls showed Clinton winning in 2016,
and she lost.” Among Republicans, it’s sort of the opposite: “The polls in 2016
didn’t reflect Trump’s strength, but he won and will win again.” So how should
people look at the polls over the final days of this campaign?
Cahaly:
One, they should ask themselves these questions: Do you know someone who is
going to vote for Trump—someone who maybe confided that fact in a few people,
but didn’t share it widely? Do you think that person, if called on the phone by
a stranger—a live person who knows who they are—would tell them? If the answer
is yes, then you should be skeptical of polls that are given with a live
person.
And ask
yourself, would you answer a survey that took 20 or 25 minutes on a Tuesday
night when you’re feeding your family? If the answer is no, then you should
look with skepticism at polls with long questionnaires.
Kapteyn: I
think it’s good to add some nuance to the idea that polls didn’t do so well in
2016, because after all, if you look at the national polls, they actually
weren’t very far off when it came to the popular vote.
Another
thing that may be a little underappreciated: One of the things that was quite
clear just from looking at the data is that there were events late in the
election season in 2016 that had an effect—for example, [FBI Director James]
Comey’s announcement that he was reopening the investigation of Hillary
Clinton’s emails. That moved the needle by, like, 2 percentage points or so. I
could see that in the data. And that’s a big number, given how tight the
election was. So I think there were some reasons why the polls seemed worse
than they perhaps were—and why they couldn’t be more accurate, because some
major events happened very late.
Cahaly: I’m
a little different on that one, because we saw the Trump numbers the whole
time. Nothing was new about them to us.
Did the gap
between polling in 2016 and the results affect the way either of you think
about polling?
Cahaly: I
became fascinated with why there was denial that social desirability bias was
in play and important. It made me realize just how critical the assurance of
anonymity is to getting an honest answer.
Other
people started using our “neighbor” question, as Arie pointed out. And that
caused us to think of some new questions we thought would be more revealing.
And this time, we decided we weren’t going to share them with the world.
Kapteyn: In
that sense, we are at opposite ends of the spectrum. We [USC’s Dornsife Center
for Economic and Social Research] are not a polling firm; we’re a research
firm. We happen to have this Internet panel where we ask people all sorts of
questions, so why not also ask them about politics? For us, this is largely an
experiment. That’s why we ask about this in different way: We want to see what
works best.
“Frankly, if I were in the business of trying to
forecast who’s going to be elected, then a national poll is a pretty poor
instrument for doing that.”
Arie Kapteyn
Frankly, if
I were in the business of trying to forecast who’s going to be elected, then a
national poll is a pretty poor instrument for doing that, because it has become
increasingly clear that the battleground states are really what matter. As far
as I can tell, there are many more state polls than four years ago—for good
reason. You see them in all the battleground states.
My model is
more this: Try to understand what works, get into these social desirability or
other questions as, frankly, a scientific exercise. And then, in the process, I
will be happy if my estimate is right on the mark. But if it isn’t, we have
probably learned something, too.
Last question:
The election ends on Tuesday. National polling has consistently shown a
substantial lead for Biden. What is your message to people who think that this
thing is done?
Cahaly: I
don’t think it’s done. Some of these national polls are not even taking into
consideration the fact that Republicans have closed the gap with voter
registrations. I don’t think they’re taking into account the number of
low-propensity voters who are voting and who will vote on Election Day. I don’t
think they’re measuring people’s genuine opinions. And I think [pollsters] are
just not going to see it coming.
There’s a
lot of hidden Trump votes out there. Will Biden win the popular vote? Probably.
I’m not even debating that. But I think Trump is likely to have an Electoral College
victory.
Kapteyn: I
will be really surprised, given our own numbers, if there isn’t a very sizable
gap between Biden and Trump in the popular vote—in favor of Biden. But in the
states? I don’t know.
Cahaly: I
like your skepticism.
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