i didn't read your whole post. too long per usual. biased per usual from what little i read. as for "shy" voters. i didn't make that up. it was chronicled from the polling errors in 2016 as one of many factors.
[/QUOTE]
You do realize that the majority of "my post" was the NYT article I linked and the discussion they included of the analysis Pawlenty and Walker provided of the effect of the protests in their respective states of MN and WI? I mean I linked the article for people to read and I posted large excerpts for some people to be able to conveniently read without having to click the link. I appreciate when folks do that for me, so I tried to return the favor- I hate blind links...
I never accused you of making up the "shy Trump voter" meme, but it has been discussed and researched a little more in-depth than the analysis either you or I made in our respective posts. I read this analysis and had saved it to my file when it was written back in July, but I was too lazy to look it up when I made my initial post.
You'll note it specifically notes and discusses the "polling errors" you referred to. And btw, Jonah Goldberg is a prominent Conservative, so it doesn't make sense to accuse him of bias...
"The theory holds that there is a large reserve army of secret Trump voters who are afraid, in this time of cancel culture, to state their preference, and that’s why the polls are so lopsided.
The theory is partly a hangover from 2016. It’s true that pollsters undercounted Trump voters in that election. But it’s a huge jump to think it was because SMAGA (Secret Make America Great Again) voters were refusing to state their preference. A postmortem by the polling industry went looking for significant numbers of SMAGAs and came up empty.
If people were afraid to tell the truth to pollsters, there should have been a gap between results from polls conducted by humans and machines. There wasn’t. "Interviewer-administered polls did not underestimate Trump’s support more than self-administered [automated] and online surveys." Pew even tested the theory by dividing interviews between live interviewers and automated ones, finding “no significant difference by mode of interview on any of four questions asking directly about Trump."
There were real polling failures in 2016, particularly at the state level, but they weren’t that wrong. An average of the final national polls indicated a Clinton victory of 3.3%. She won the popular vote by 2.1% — well within the margin of error. Pollsters called 47 out of 50 states correctly and they weren’t all that off in the ones they got wrong. Remember, Trump won thanks to 80,000 votes in three states."
https://www.yahoo.com/news/goldberg-army-secret-trump-voters-190948417.html
"Sure, some undecided voters could be considered “secret” voters for one candidate or another, but only if they were lying about being undecided, and there’s little evidence of that. Moreover, common sense would suggest that social desirability bias — the driver for secret or “shy” voting theories — would be strongest in blue states, where Trump will lose no matter what. Many of the anecdotes of secret voters come from Republicans who live in places like New York and California. In states where the race is close — the only states that really matter in this election — something like half the voters support Trump, so why would anyone have to be afraid to say they’re voting for him? "
