A Country Where People Are Afraid to Tell Pollsters What They Think

“I like a good contrarian argument as much as the next guy,” tweets mild-mannered RealClearPolitics senior elections analyst Sean Trende, “but there’s really no getting around the fact that the 2020 polling was a pile of steaming garbage.”

“The national polls were even worse than they were four years ago,” writes New York Times polling guru Nate Cohn. {snip}

Trende and Cohn have earned credibility as two of the few political analysts who spotted, before Donald Trump’s surprise victory, that white non-college graduates were underrepresented in media and exit polls and their potential for voting more Republican was overlooked. This year, pollsters adjusted their samples to include accurate proportions of that demographic, but the responses didn’t match the results.

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{snip} Republican pollster Patrick Ruffini’s chart comparing preelection polling and the Associated Press VoteCast exit polls identifies white college graduates, women as well as men, as voting much more Republican than indicated in preelection polling.

National Journal’s Josh Kraushaar showed how this produced unexpected results in House races: Public and partisan polls showed Democrats gaining seats, but Republicans have actually gained 6 to 13 seats. {snip}

Kraushaar cited two Republican strategists’ interviews of suburban voters over six months in which respondents complained about “the excesses of so-called ‘cancel culture,’ pointing to a stifling environment where employees worry they can be fired or punished for heterodox political views expressed at the workplace.” Such voters may not be willing to voice those views to an interviewer who may have their name or address, but they vote against such political correctness at the ballot box.

Rigorous support for this view comes from political scientists Eric Kaufmann, a London-based Canadian of Jewish, Chinese and Latino ancestry whose 2019 book “Whiteshift” puts today’s ethnic changes in historic perspective. {snip}

“Republican supporters with degrees tend to work in graduate-dominated environments, where organisations and peers are more likely to enforce norms of political correctness,” Kaufmann writes in the British online magazine Unherd. “As a result, it is highly-educated Republican supporters who are most shy about revealing their beliefs at work.” He cites polling evidence that 45% of Republican college grads versus only 23% of Democratic grads “said they feared that their careers could be at risk if their views became known.” This is a case of political speech, in daily life and even in polling interviews, being suppressed out of fear.

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