dbInSouthCity wrote: ↑Sep 24, 2020
framer wrote: ↑Sep 24, 2020
dbInSouthCity wrote: ↑Sep 24, 2020
There is no such thing as a shy Trump voter.
You've got to be kidding. I'd bet that a great majority of those who plan to vote for Trump would never admit it.
In today's social/political climate, where you can get assaulted for simply wearing a MAGA hat, where you get eviscerated on social media for suggesting that there may be two sides to a story, where you can be Doxed for daring to express an opinion that doesn't follow the currently trending party line?
I'd say that there's a huge number of Trump voters that are very shy indeed. The good-ol'-boys yelling and screaming from pickup trucks make the headlines, but the quiet, conservative Republican base will be voting in large numbers.
Yeah I am sure republican base will vote, only issue is that gets you to about 35% vs 40% to the Democrat base. And the middle voters are on Biden by 10-15 points.
The whole “shy trump voter” thing came about because he won Pa and Michigan when polls said he would lose them but it wasn’t because of shy Trump voters it was because polls didn’t weigh properly for education to see what non college educated whites that voted Obama went to Trump. The polls in those states ended up being too college educated. Polling isn’t just as simple as calling 500 people. You have to make educated guesses (put intended) on whole host of issues like education, race, etc. in your sample size. Those issues are largely fixed as we seen in the deadly accurate 2018 polls. 7 point lead for Biden in Michigan today is very different from a 7 point Hillary lead in 2016 there
Worth noting that the polls in Pennsylvania and Michigan weren't really all that far off from the actual results, and Clinton wound up outperforming her poll numbers in both PA and MI...
The final RCP average in Pennsylvania right before the election was...
Clinton 46.2%
Trump 44.3%
The actual results:
Clinton 47.5%
Trump 48.2%
The polling average was off by 2.6%, which is definitely in the margin of error. Both candidates beat their pre-election averages, but the undecided voters broke heavily for Trump right at the end.
The final RCP average in Michigan right before the election was...
Clinton 45.4%
Trump 42.0%
The actual results:
Clinton 47.0%
Trump 47.3%
The polling average was off a little more here (3.7%), but it was still pretty close to what the averages were indicating beforehand, and again, Clinton didn't underperform relative to her predicted vote share, but Trump won a much larger chunk of the undecided voters.
Trump winning Pennsylvania and Michigan shocked everyone because the Democrats had such a long strong of elections winning those states (all the way back to 1992), but they really shouldn't have been too shocked, because they were both toss-up states and Clinton was only slightly favored to win both.
Wisconsin was the one crucial state where the polling and the results were pretty far out of sync - Clinton was picked to win by 6.5%, and she lost by 0.7%. She also fell just shy of her pre-election polling average in that state. That's the only state that mattered where the pollsters got it really wrong. Everything else of consequence was actually pretty close. Ohio wound up being a much bigger win for Trump than predicted, but he was already ahead of her in the polls by 3.5% before the election (he won it by 8.1%). Minnesota was also pretty far off from what most of the polls were indicating, but Clinton still won it, albeit by a much smaller margin than was expected. Florida had Trump leading by 0.2% before the election, and he won it by 1.2% - definitely within the MoE.
My point is, as much as people talk about how the pollsters got it all wrong in 2016... they really didn't, for the most part. The poll analysts like Sam Wang who were giving Clinton a 98% chance of victory were obviously way off base, but Wang isn't a pollster, he's just a data guy who analyzes poll data and makes predictions based on that analysis.
