"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.