Funny, I realized that I've never thought about how I react to polls until reading your comment. I flat out refuse to answer polls regardless of who is asking. I refuse to leave any public artifacts of my political feelings (signs, bumper stickers, facebook comments, etc). The reason is exactly as you describe - I have nothing to gain and potentially something to lose.

I am a problem for pollsters and there's no reason to think I'm unique in this regard.

But, given the apparent popularity of social media you shouldn’t assume you’re representative either. I’m sure there are people like you - but we would be helped with a way to measure how many there are in polls. Guessing here, I’d imagine it’s related to income/age/sex/education/etc and possibly distinct subsets of those categories. Who knows though.

I’m increasingly of the opinion that opinion polling needs to be closely reconsidered for informing policy. People conflate polls with votes and something above 50% is seen as having something like a mandate. But it seems like a very immature field or being used for way more than it’s worth.

Not being a fan of push polls, for phone polls/opinion polls, I have a simple response. I let them know my charge for focus group participation is $200/hour, 2 hour minimum, plus expenses.

The person on the other end is getting paid, but I’m the one with the desired information. Are these terms acceptable?

The conversation ends quickly.

Push polls really poisoned the well...

I did one of the phone polls about 15 years ago, and after about 30 minutes of questions I was really tired of the whole thing. But the last stroke is when instead of asking my opinions about issues/etc they started asking the personal questions (presumably to categorize me race, income/etc) I told them I was done answering questions and refused to answer anything that wasn't something you could conclude by looking at me on the street. Now I just say "no" and hang up.

And thats probably a big problem for them too, I had a few friends in HS who worked as pollsters at the local mall, they actually paid people in gift certificates and the like for the hour they took up. It was all really upfront, "Hi, would you like a $10 gift card for an hour of your time answering questions?". IIRC it was 100% issue questions too, the age/race/etc questions were all later filled out by the pollster from what they saw rather than being questions on the form.

So, yah, I'm guessing its a lot cheaper to run phone polls than pay people in the mall to give out gift cards.

The sole time I answer a political poll, I remember being unable to answer a single question. Each one was so obviously a loaded question and completely missing context that I couldn't respond. All I could say is I need more context which they could not give.

I've come to the conclusion that it makes sense (morally, though perhaps not persoanlly) to broadcast your viewpoint when it is generally suppressed, but not when it is already a mainstream viewpoint.

A blue message in redville makes it more acceptable to discuss and is an opportunity for communication and progress; likewise for a red message in blueville.

But if you are broadcasting a blue message in blueville, you are just jumping on the identity bandwagon, further alienating the red tribe; and likewise for broadcasting a red message in redville, which just alienates the blue tribe.

I wish I could do this better. It still scares the heck out of me to say something that could be construed as even remotely redville when I’m in navy blueville. I’m sure others feel the same way in the opposite circumstance.

I think almost everyone would feel the same way. I know I would. We should reflect on why we feel more like this than in 2010.

Persoanlly, I think it has to do with the moral realm vs the practical realm. We think of morality as a good thing, but it is more about absolutes than goodness. As we bring more things into the moral realm -- who you vote for, for example -- it shuts down reason, discourse, nuance, and understanding.

Traditionally, the moral realm is about what you do. There's not much value in society discussing murder and whether its a good thing to do or not; and there's a lot of potential harm. If murder becomes an issue of nuance, people can rationalize it too easily and you get chaos.

Now, I feel like our thoughts are becoming part of the moral realm, and that's a bad thing. There's no chance to discuss and learn together if one person thinks that the other is evil. It also means that it's easy for an otherwise good person to do horrible things because they feel that they are attacking evil.

I don't meam to say that moralization is new. It has certainly happened in the past, say with McCarthyism, or the Spanish Inquisition. But it does feel like the pendulum is swinging in the direction of everything-is-a-matter-of-good-and-evil.

And frankly, it seems like most of this moralization of thought is coming from the left. There's still some socialism-is-evil sentiment on the right, but that was pretty minor this cycle compared with the Trump-is-evil sentiment.

"middle ground" is anti both sides. As rightly mentioned, things are very polarised now. Thanks to hyper-targeted social media content, one side has no clue what is the other side reading & making opinions from.

Fencing like this may be an extraordinary feat.

I for one want to engage at a level where the cost/benefit at most allows an 'opponent' to reevaluate their stance. At least, I can understand a thread of reasoning that is alien to me.

I understand engaging in a radius of reason. I implore you to build relationships that necessitate constructive debate.

Polls showed similar results for the presidential race whether they were online or over the phone, so the whole “too shy to admit your politics to a human” argument isn’t a very good one:

https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/trump-supporters-arent-...

People who hold controversial ideas may also not trust a computerized system. It isn't just about the person on the other end of the phone judging you. It's that someone is recording what you believe, and you may not be as anonymous as you think.

And who answers the phones these days? The ones that do are so rare and unique that they can hardly be a representative sample.

Research has confirmed that people don't lie to pollsters in any meaningful way when asked their head to head preference.

It's mentioned in the last graph of the article. The crux of this article is rather than 'shy trump voters' there is simply a large amount of these Trump voters who will refuse to take a survey flat out.

"Pollsters say people don't lie to pollsters" is a bad argument. I ended up on some list and lied to every caller out of spite. These people are effectively telemarketers for corrupt propaganda companies interrupting my family at dinner. They don't deserve my honest opinion.

The important thing isn't people lying to pollsters, its people lying to pollsters in a way that's coordinated with a particular demographic or voting block.

If 10% of people surveyed, at random, lie to the pollsters and choose the "opposite" candidate out of spite, you'll actually see a sort of reversion to the mean compared to the actual opinions.

Assuming that people are lying at random.

I would bet there is a significant correlation with voting habits -- particularly in this election cycle. Why wouldn't someone who holds the view that polls are corrupt and biased have their attitude towards answering them affected by that?

> Why wouldn't someone who holds the view that polls are corrupt and biased have their attitude towards answering them affected by that?

If your opinion was that polls were biased against your candidate, how would that make you answer? Is it more likely to make you answer in favor of your candidate, answer in favor of the other candidate, or go out of your way to participate in polls to "fight back" against the bias?

You can invent a narrative that supports pretty much any activity. Only some of these narratives have any data behind them.

As far as I'm aware the best-supported theory by data isn't that people intentionally lie, but that they simply don't participate in polls because they narrative pushed by republican campaigns is that the polls are always wrong. This is, we'll say, half true.

What I'm interested in, now that the republican talking point is that the actual polls don't matter, since Democrats are stealing the election anyway, is if Republican turnout will similarly decrease.

Are you saying it’s a bad argument, and contradicts previous research because your personal experience differs? That sounds like anecdata, not argument.

There were two arguments made by parent. One was a variation on the silliness of "my data shows that my data is good".

The other was personal anecdata explaining that it doesn't have to be a political agenda driving the bad data.

Isn't trump voters refusing to take polls what everyone means when they say "shy trump voters"?

As far as I understand, the traditional sense of "shy voter" is to describe your poll numbers (i.e. the people who did take the survey) which answered "undecided" when they were shy about their choice. This also goes hand in hand with things like observed differences in answers of in-person surveys when the person doing the survey is/isn't from the same demographic as the person being surveyed.

A disproportional amount of people (after controlling for race/gender/income/education/etc) simply refusing to answer the survey has similar but conceptually different effect; one that (as the OP claims - perhaps they're mistaken) is new and had not been a significant factor before.

If I didn't have five of them calling me every day, day after day, I might be more likely to answer.

If half of them weren't push polls trying to disguise themselves as unbiased, I might be more likely to answer.

As it is, though? No. Go away. All of you go away. You'll find out my opinion when I vote. Until then, leave me alone.

Those of us who don't live in a swing state don't have to deal with them nearly as much.

I wish. I don't live in a swing state. (Though I guess I do live in a hotly-contested congressional district. In fact, it still hasn't been called.)

Not quite, it's a subtle nuance. The concept of a shy Trump supporter is that they're afraid of a stigma associated with admitting support for Trump.

That is different than someone who just doesn't want to take a poll but may be perfectly happy to tell you their views if you struck up a conversation. My own observation is that over the last 4 years, Trump supporters have become ever more loud and proud of that support, not more shy.

But the reason they're not taking the poll is because they don't want to admit support for Trump, right? Of course some are happy to tell everyone, but some aren't. Otherwise why is this concept of republicans responding to polls less just starting now with Trump?

No, not if the hypothesis of the article is correct: They have lower social trust & cooperation metrics, and are disinclined to answer any polls. As for why it started with Trump, there could be a few reasons, all speculation on my part: He may be attracting people who didn't vote much before, and these new voters are the sorts of people who have lower trust etc., and so don't answer polls. Personally though, I think it might be more that President Trump's messaging fosters & encourages a certain amount of distrust: Fake News, anything negative about him are lies, deep state conspiracies, other views aren't just disagreements but bad/treason/sedition, etc. If distrustful people don't answer polls, and President Trump has made his followers more distrustful, then his followers are now less likely to answer polls. Just a hypothesis though.

Yea I agree, they need to find a new term I guess because it seems pretty clear that this is what's been happening to me at least. I guess my question was more along the lines of who doesn't think this was the issue? Seems so obvious that his conspiracy theory squad won't want to talk to pollsters. Plus energized dems are more willing than usual to talk. The 1% response rate is a crazy number. How could they possibly think they're getting a representative sample if only 1% of people respond and responding is a choice? If there's any correlation between predisposition to respond and preferred candidate they're fucked. And it's hard to believe there wouldn't be.

Everybody in the industry/science around this has been worried about it for years (at least 2008, when I started paying attention to this stuff).

It's just become a lot more salient now, as the polls have been pretty crappy lately.

There's a few ways to infer whether or not a 1% response rate is truly representative, or if there's some selection bias with responders responding because they're different that non responders beyond that one simple binary behavior.

My job is basically data analyst/programmer, but I have a decent background in research of this sort (not politics, surveys and qualitative research) and occasionally have to conduct surveys. It often falls to me, or I insist on it, because practically no one knows how to write quality survey questions that aren't leading questions that bias the response.

For example, if you wanted an opinion on a new food product, someone that doesn't know how to ask a neutral question (or is purposely rigging the survey) could ask "How much do you like these french fries? 1) Fantastic 2) Very Good 3) Good 4) Okay 5) Awful. Those answers are front stacked with positive answers, only one negative answer, and no neutral answer. If someone doesn't believe they're awful, they have no choice but to answer "okay".

In any case, one common method I use to measure the presence of responder selection bias is a followup communication to non-responders 1-2 weeks later to nudge them to take the survey. The hypothesis is that people who did not response initially, but do respond when prodded again, will represent a middle point between initial responders & complete non-responders. If that middle point is not statistically significant in their responses that the original responders, I can infer that non-responders are less likely to be a group that would answer differently if had bothered to answer.

No, this is absolutely not a perfect method. More robust methods are needed to further reduce uncertainty: Ethnographic & other qualitative studies can help. Talk to responders to find out what they responded and consider the inverse. e.g., if they say "this is a really important election we have to get Trump out and I want to spread the word so it was important to share my opinion" that should make you question whether Trump supporters would feel the same way about responding.

To really get to non-responders, you need more time & more resources. Find them and pay them to talk to you. It's not uncommon to reward research participants who certainly wouldn't participate otherwise.

Again, none of these are perfect, they just inch you close to greater understanding a little bit at a time.

The badly worded question issue is clearly major, but it's received so much publicity, and with meta pollers like 538 existing it seems like it shouldn't be a huge problem when there's such a wide selection of big money polls available. All those ideas seem decent, but as you said they're not really solving the problem, just inching you toward a less biased sample. I'm sure people that already declined to take the poll are real happy to be bothered again about it. As far as I can tell the only way to actually make polling work is to force people to respond, and obviously that won't happen. And even if it did people would give troll answers(at school we had captive polls and the last question was always "how seriously did you take this poll?" of course the least serious people always marked themselves as most serious). Even paying people to respond biases the sample because now you're more likely to get people who want money(not necessarily totally correlated with income). Of course you can infer that your sample is biased by one side being more enthusiastic, but without a way to enumerate how biased you're nowhere.

No, "shy Trump voter" specifically means someone who says they are not voting for Trump (or undecided) then does so, because they're afraid to "admit" voting for him.

Correct

This reads to me as being in alignment with the parent comment to which it was posted as a response.

"... voters who will refuse to take a survey flat out" is equivalent to "... simply tak[ing] a neutral, non-committal stance on almost every hot-button issue these days."

Taking a neutral stance to the poller. That's not the same thing as taking a neutral stance on the issues.

I guess I am not human, then.

I'd lie to pollsters because I dislike the practice. It causes irrelevant news, and feeds into strategic voting. One distracts / causes pageviews, other one lowers the integrity of our democracy. My data can skew the accuracy of pollsters, however little that is, thereby hurting their interests.

I am also open to lying to telemarketers as I despise their job. Perfect example of a Bullshit Job.

An effective poll should be highly anonymized, like voting, for the same reasons.

You pick a random piece of paper from a stack, check some boxes, put the paper into an opaque box with all other papers. This makes tracking the paper back to you impractical, if not impossible.

This is, of course, not achievable by phone calls, and also hardly achievable over the internet (only maybe using Tor). This also may make it harder to control for age, gender, race, etc.

Otherwise, expressing any opinion (even the most orthodox at the time of the poll) may potentially be turned against you, and there is no obvious personal benefit for most people in expressing their opinion to strangers.

The problem with polls is that there is substantial bias introduced by the fact that only a particular type of person volunteers to participate in polls, not because people are lying to pollsters because they are afraid of their identity being tied to their answers. Anonymizing the polls will not fix partisan non-response bias.

When I was younger and just becoming politically aware, I recall stories of people confessing that they told their family they voted one way when in fact they voted another.

There are very few consequences for dissembling, lots of consequences for being transparent, and in fact the ability to lie about your vote is essentially built into our current voting mechanism as a right. I dabbled in electronic voting for a bit, and the open source folks were struggling with this quality. Being able to disavow an act is called 'repudiation', and many crypto systems have nonrepudiation as a feature. But you also need to prevent ballot box stuffing, so you need a way to assert that John Smith voted, but not who he voted for.

But keeping this feature means that anyone with an IQ above 80 can't be coerced or bribed into voting for a particular person. You give me $200, blackmail, extort, or otherwise encourage me very strongly to vote for Hitler, but I can just vote Ficus and tell you I voted Hitler.

Some rando walking up to you after voting, or worse, before, how do I know they're asking in earnest instead of with some agenda? I'll say anything I can think of to get away from them as fast as possible.

>It's much more likely - no matter which side you're for - that the person asking could have an adverse reaction. Things are just way too polarized now, not sure how that can change, but that's how it is.

What? When was the last time a pollster got upset because of your response? Or are you somehow worried that the results will leak out and you'll get canceled?

How do you know it's a pollster calling?

...because they identify themselves as such? I guess it's possible that someone impersonates a pollster, but that'd fall under the second part of my comment, which I haven't see evidence of happening.

Years ago back when I had a landline, I was excited when "Gallup" had finally called me to participate in a poll.

It turned out to be a "push poll" for a particular issue (which I agree with) where they were trying to identify personal info about myself and sign me up for something.

I suspect this was not an uncommon campaign technique, and it only needed to happen once before ppl stop answering calls from "Gallup".

My father gets regular calls from "pollsters" who then ask for a donation for the candidate they really represent.

If you can't admit you voted for someone, maybe you shouldn't be voting for them. If you are afraid of your neigbors finding out your political leanings, maybe the problem isn't your neighbors but the candidate you are supporting.

If you want to support a specific candidate and everything they believe in, that's just fine, but you should feel comfortable saying as much and, if you feel up for it, laying out the reasoning.

I am completely fine admitting voting for Biden, why he isn't my favorite and who I would prefer. I feel zero shame, you shouldn't either.

Just my POV.

Being able to vote anonymously and without regard for being shamed by your neighbours is a feature, not a bug, and one of the last protections against democracy being hijacked by intimidation and mass groupthink.

I have plenty of beliefs I'm not ashamed of on a personal level, that I think are noble, wholesome, and just, that I sure as fuck don't want my employer knowing.

People are bigots. It's not just bad beliefs that are judged harshly.

Can you think of any situations in which non-secret ballots might cause undesirable effects?

The Soviet Union had a long tradition of non-secret ballots--and naturally virtually everyone voted for the Communist Party candidate [there weren't other candidates, but theoretically you could vote yes or no on the ones on the ballot].

> I am completely fine admitting voting for Biden, why he isn't my favorite and who I would prefer. I feel zero shame, you shouldn't either.

There are a lot of communities where you wouldn't be completely fine admitting you vote for Biden. Being allowed to vote for Biden anyway is a good thing, being forced to vote on what your peers voted in is bad.

Yeah, and good people have nothing to hide! Isn’t that right Alexa?