The Shy Trump Voter is Real
Pollsters are missing likely Trump voters- again.
In 2008, Rasmussen published a little-noticed report about tectonic changes in polling methodology. In it, the preeminent polling company acknowledged that fewer people were responding in polls than ever before. It also noted that White males aged 30–49 without a college education were the most difficult to reach for polling purposes.
Polling researchers concluded in the report that the cost of reaching “hard to reach” respondents simply wasn’t worth it. The herculean efforts it took researchers to successfully poll hard to reach people were simply too time consuming, too expensive. The results of such efforts, it was thought, were too meager to be valuable to pollsters.
Before 2016, reaching these particular hard to reach respondents wasn’t that important. They didn’t respond in polls, but they didn’t vote in unusually large numbers, either. People who are hard to poll are hard for political campaigns to reach as well.
In 2016, Trump reached them. Pollsters did not.
Scientific American published a piece in the early days after the 2016 upset of Donald Trump’s election. In it, the author described the shy Trump voter. In “Voter Embarrassment about Trump Support May Have Messed Up Poll Predictions,” behavioral scientist Aradhna Krishna wrote:
