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One experience I had (coming from an Austrian right wing province) is that a significant share of polled people will not reveal to the pollster they are voting
by atoav 2y ago
One experience I had (coming from an Austrian right wing province) is that a significant share of polled people will not reveal to the pollster they are voting for the xenophobic candidate, because they don't want to be seen as a bigot.
It is like when your doctor is asking you if you eat fast food — some people will downplay it because they know it is wrong, but do it anyways in a "weak" moment when nobody is looking.
So suddenly in my village where I know everybody 56% voted for the right wing candidate, yet everybody¹ claimed not to do that when asked before or after.
¹: except one or two open Nazis
- lmz 2y agoThis has a name: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shy_Tory_factor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shy_Tory_factor
- the5avage 2y agoThis is the most likely explaination imo. But even then it should be possible to use bayes rule to price it into the result.
- fuzzfactor 2y agoThis is the way it was with Nixon. After he was finally disgraced fully enough to resign with some remaining dignity, you couldn't find anybody who admitted to voting for him. And he had been re-elected to a second term !
- agumonkey 2y agoEven outside the polls. Trump rallies really started to empty out in the last weeks.
- dredmorbius 2y agoPolling isn't merely a reporting of raw responses, but a calibrating of those responses to known bias factors. Those might be psychological (as you describe) where people are reluctant to reveal actual preferences, but also include numerous others: - Who does or does not have a phone. - Who will or won't answer a phone. - Specific target demographics, under the rubric of "stratified random sampling". Just a few off the top of my head. As I'd mentioned upstream, political polling has regular calibration events called "elections", and following those events biases and adjustment factors, most falling out of statistical analysis and correlations, rather than "gut feels", are updated. The problem for the US seems to be that the biases are accelerating well in advance of those adjustments, as my own poll-vs-vote analysis shows: Thread: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42060547 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42060547> Most robust analysis / results here: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42064420 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42064420>