Posted on 03/27/2017 11:11:40 PM PDT by 2ndDivisionVet
As they investigate the forces behind the party’s stunning losses in November, Democrats are coming to a troubling conclusion. The party didn’t just lose among rural white voters on Election Day, it may have failed to capture them in its pre-election polling as well.
Many pollsters and strategists believe that rural white voters, particularly those without college degrees, eluded the party’s polling altogether — and their absence from poll results may have been both a cause and a symptom of Donald Trump’s upset victory over Hillary Clinton in several states.
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. Determining what exactly happened is one of the most pressing problems facing the out-of-power party. In order to win those voters back — or figure out a future path to victory without them — party strategists say they first need to measure the size of that rural and working-class cohort.
John Hagner, a partner at Clarity Campaign Labs, a D.C.-based Democratic analytics firm, said 2016 taught the party a hard lesson about polling in the Trump era.
“The folks who would talk to a stranger about politics just aren’t representative of people who wouldn’t,” he said.
The first evidence of the party’s polling blind spot surfaced in a governor’s race, the 2015 contest in Kentucky. Both public and private polls going into the election showed Democrat Jack Conway and Republican Matt Bevin running neck-and-neck — Conway had a 3-point lead in the final RealClearPolitics average — but Bevin won by a comfortable, 9-point margin.
Like some of the more Democratic states where Trump upset Clinton last year, Kentucky has a large rural and a large working-class white population (often there is considerable overlap in the groups). Whites make up 88 percent of Kentucky’s population, and fewer than a quarter of Kentucky residents over age 25 have a college degree.
Demographic trends confirm that these voters have been moving toward Republicans, but they don’t provide an easy answer for why pollsters have struggled to capture them in surveys.
Hagner sees some similarities between Bevin and Trump — both businessmen who initially positioned themselves as insurgent candidates within the GOP. In both cases, there were signs of what’s known as "social-desirability bias," the idea that voters won’t admit for whom they intend to vote because they think others will look unfavorably on their choice.
“With both Bevin and Trump, every newspaper endorsed against them,” Hagner said. “The right answer, in air quotes, was, ‘I’m not going to vote for them.’ … There’s a small group of people who knew that, at some level, they didn’t want their support for Trump to be scrutinized.”
Pollsters are still analyzing whether a “shy Trump voter” effect may have been decisive in some states. Like the public polls, Democrats struggled to measure the presidential race in private polls in a number of Upper Midwest states with large numbers of working-class white voters.
Clinton’s campaign mostly ignored Michigan and Wisconsin — where public and private surveys showed Clinton consistently ahead — until the final days of the race and was edged narrowly on Election Day by Trump. And the campaign invested heavily in Iowa and Ohio — two traditional battlegrounds where she trailed — only to lose both by larger margins than expected.
“We projected Clinton to lose Ohio by 200,000 votes,” said Hagner, “and she lost by 450,000.”
Democrats’ polling problems might not only be voters hiding their intentions from pollsters — some voters may have been hiding altogether.
That bias against responding covers a number of different elements, including geography. One top Democratic strategist who requested anonymity to discuss candidly what went wrong with the 2016 polls pointed to difficulty in reaching voters in more rural districts because of spotty cellphone service.
The same strategist added that many of these voters also may choose not to participate in polls “because they don’t like the establishment and they don’t want to take a survey.”
The yawning education gap among white voters’ preferences — Trump clobbered Clinton among white voters without a college degree, while the two ran neck-and-neck among those with a degree — means that nonresponse bias may have been determinative, said Democratic pollster Nick Gourevitch, a partner at Global Strategy Group. And it may have been going on for some time.
“I think it’s very plausible that for years pollsters have been over-representing educated voters, and that it only came back to bite us recently because it was a key driver in vote preferences this time,” Gourevitch said.
It’s too early to say for sure that this explains Democrats’ struggles over the past two election cycles — or that these issues will still be relevant in 2017 and 2018. Most Democrats — along with Republicans and nonpartisan analysts — are waiting for more states to collect and publish data of which voters did and did not cast ballots, a process expected to conclude later this spring.
Democrats aren’t ready to prescribe remedies yet, but officials at the national party committees are sending strong signals that they plan to hold pollsters to a higher standard in the upcoming midterm elections. Rep. Ben Ray Luján of New Mexico, who is chairing the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee for the second consecutive election cycle, ruffled feathers last month when he suggested that “unreliable pollsters will not be invited back to the DCCC.”
A committee spokeswoman, Meredith Kelly, clarified last month that pollsters’ reliability isn’t just going to be determined by their 2016 results, but also by their willingness to participate in a DCCC-driven effort to test various polling methods.
“It’s more about unreliable data combined with an unwillingness to do better and to learn from that,” said Kelly, the DCCC’s communications director. “That’s when we’ll stop working with people.”
To that end, the DCCC plans to use this year’s races for other offices to test its pollsters — and different methods to reach the voters who caused problems in recent elections. That could include using its own automated survey infrastructure.
“We’re going to use the 2017 elections to basically ask multiple pollsters to test rural and exurban areas that have overlaps with some of our [target] districts,” Kelly said. “It’ll be an ongoing thing, so we’ll have a way to test whose approaches worked and were most predictive.”
Elisabeth Pearson, executive director of the Democratic Governors Association, said her organization conducted a review after the 2015 Kentucky governor’s race and intends to use it as a model for how to proceed headed into the next two years, when gubernatorial elections will be held in 38 of 50 states.
“I’ve seen a ton of openness from pollsters. We’ve done a couple of these meetings where we’ve brought all these pollsters that we worked with and had a great conversation about best practices, deep dives into things like sampling,” said Pearson. “I think they all understand that it’s in their best interests.”
Wow, I didn’t realize Gary Johnson received 4.27M votes. Thank God Trump pulled it out, even with that.
Exactly. These voters aren’t “shy” - they are intentionally withholding information from the enemy.
Spot on.
The Democratic allies create the shy Republican voter by the way they try to knock the candidate down. The Democratic allies in the press create a flak cloud of negative non-stories like “Trump Refuses to Release Tax Forms.” The news presenter looks deadly serious as he stares directly into the camera and repeats this non-news like he is announcing one hundred grand mothers were just murdered. But the voter has a brain and can compare what the news-reader says with what he already knows about the security violations of the opponent, how the opponent got paid huge speaking fees and then supported legislation favoring those same payers and, somehow, that is not news. So the “facts” in the flak cloud look even more trivial. But rather than argue with that serious-seeming portrayal which surely lots of people seem fooled by, they avoid talking to others or they lie about who they’ll vote for.
These days we should refer to that group as “unindoctrinated” instead of “uneducated”.
I have no idea how many pollsters tried to contact me before the election. If I get a call from a number I don’t recognize I don’t answer it. Simple as that.
I:
- graduated HS in 1982
- then joined the Army for 6+ years (learned a lot of non-college skills and discipline)
- pursued technical training in IT by studying many long hours after work.
- have been making over $100K a year since 1996
- got my associates degree in 2012.
- should finish my BS in 2018 at age 54
- expect to enroll in my masters that same year and finish by 2020.
My chosen path indicates that I will be making C level salary two years after that at age 58. Not bad for the son of a backwoods Florida welder who did not finish HS.
Education (or skills) is only one of three legs of success. The other two are:
- drive or ambition (goals)
- dedication or discipline (effort)
The libs only look at skills and that is why they do not understand the differences in success.
I have two masters and I’m completing my dissertation. And I wouldn’t say the Trump voters I’ve met were “shy.”
The dems are so lost they’ll wander in the desert for forty years. I hope.
I don’t expect there is much overlap between the non college educated American worker, who wants government out of their way, and the democrat core voter in big cities who is a high school dropout and very dependent on government services. My gut is that when you poll the ones who need government, they are loud and want more. When you try to poll folks who just try to live peacefully, they tell the caller to f*ck off.
There was enough public discussion of how crooked pollsters were and how to intentionally foil them over the last couple of elections that Im not sure that this type of monkeywrenching can be ignored as not having played a part.
“Did you catch the part about the Democrats controlling the pollsters?”
Which explains it all. WikiLeaks exposed that the DNC/Hillary Campaign instructed media and pollsters on which geographic areas to poll to fill demographic quotas with Dems, and even the times of day to make their calls, to game the results their way. Polling results were false because the pollsters followed Hillary’s specifications. Being a megalomaniac, Clinton 1) believed the lies she generated; and, 2) can never admit being at fault. This article is the sound of her co-dependent sycophants pretending to believe that pollsters screwed up on their own. The pollsters will thank Dear Leader for showing them their errors.
Remember that the polling genius Nate Silver gave Trump a 2% chance of winning the Republican primary. We also had our contingent of establishment squishes here on FR telling us that the polls were accurate before and would be accurate again in 2016.
Trump won because African-American voters in PA, OH, MI and WI did not come out to vote for Hillary.
bmp
That’s a great way to put it, and I give credit where credit it due: They didn’t trust her, and they were right.
For the enemedia to feign surprise is absurd, though; she initially had to distance herself from Otoken (because he was a failed president with a horrible economy), then had to enlist him in the end. When Hillary was campaigning in the Deep Ghetto (Philly) right before Election Day, while Trump had been venturing out into “safe” Dem states, it was clear that both campaigns understood what was happening. The media couldn’t have missed it; they just deliberately failed to report it.
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