There Just Isn’t Good Evidence That ‘Shy’ Trump Voters Exist
Yes, Geoffrey, the theory of “shy” Trump voters first emerged even before Trump won the 2016 election. The idea was that some voters who intended to vote for Trump would decline to share that information with pollsters because of social-desirability bias -- supporting Trump could be viewed negatively by the person conducting the survey. Trump’s victory, alongside a larger-than-average polling error in the Upper Midwest, only bolstered the idea that voters weren’t revealing their true intentions to pollsters.
Between the 2016 and 2020 elections, we've received A LOT of questions about “shy” Trump voters, most recently because of a Politico article in which two pollsters suggested these voters could play a role in 2020. The reality is that there isn’t good evidence “shy” Trump voters exist -- or that they exist in any larger proportion than, say, “shy” Biden voters. We ran through many of the reasons for that in this recent episode of Model Talk on the FiveThirtyEight Politics podcast. If you’re looking for something to do while you wait for the vote to start coming in, give it a listen.