These folks picked up on a few clues that others missed… including that ‘fishy’ 0% Trump support among black voters.
A few polling companies scored far better than the others. They share their take-aways now that the election is over.
One of those winning groups was the one ClashDaily cited the day before the election having Trump doing very well in Florida. The article mentioned the one clever question that got a deeper sense of what the local voting ‘mood’ was like. (see it here).
Here are a few excepts from a Politico column which really is worth reading.
Robert Cahaly, Senior Strategist, Trafalgar Group: There was a segment of voters that a lot of the different organizations weren’t polling, and that was one of the first things we noticed when we did the analysis from spring, especially in the two states that were easiest for us to get the data, Georgia and South Carolina. And what we noticed when we went back and looked is the difference between those who voted in the Republican primary this year and those who voted in primaries historically was vast. And it was one-sided [only on the Republican side].
And so, we started from that, back in the primary to create a model of what this Trump voter looks like, which is not a new voter, but a lapsed voter. We broke them up into people who had voted in the 2008 presidential election forward, and people who voted in 2006 or earlier and had not participated forward.
And so, we took that universe of those who have participated in 2006 or previous—we’re talking about people who voted for the last time in the ‘70s, in the ‘80s, in the ‘90s, and earlier 2000s, and we created the term Trump surge voters, and we added them into our call database as well as the newly registered, because in our experience, when people register to vote for the first time, the election that follows is the one that they’re most likely to participate in. So we had a good mix of newly registered voters as well as what we call our Trump surge voters. So, we started by basically having a different type to make our soup from, and we put all those in there.
There was some other good stuff:
Fossett: This big surprise taught us a few really hard lessons about voter behavior. You’re getting at one now about shy voters, but what were the lessons that all of you took away that you hadn’t really thought about before, about the way people vote?
Kapteyn: I would like to sort of underline what was just said about shy voters. So, a few weeks ago—one or two weeks before the election—we asked a couple of questions to our respondents where we said, “Do you feel comfortable discussing who you want to vote for with others?” And then, we had a number of possibilities, could be their friends, could be their family. And we asked about over the Internet which is obviously what we’re doing, and then also when someone calls you and asks you who you’re going to vote for.
Of course we were mainly interested in the last one, this, “How comfortable are you to tell someone on the phone who you’re going to vote for?” There is some indication, and we have to look at it a little more, that the Trump voters were a little more uncomfortable with telling someone, but there were groups within the Trump voter camp that felt particularly uncomfortable. And one of those groups was women who planned to vote for Trump. So, I think there is definitely something to that.
A little more about the ‘shy voter phenomenon’.
Cahaly: I saw a lot of commentators refer to this say that they believe that the “shy voter” worked both ways [shy Trump and shy Hillary voters]. That is not what we experienced. In fact, what we experienced was a pattern that was so unnatural we knew there had to be something to it.
I grew up in the South and everybody is very polite down here, and if you want to find out the truth on a hot topic, you can’t just ask the question directly. So, the neighbor is part of the mechanism to get that real answer. In the 11 battle ground states, and 3 non-battleground, there was a significant drop-off between the ballot test question [which candidate you support] and the neighbors’ question [which candidate you believe most of your neighbors support]. The neighbors question result showed a similar result in each state: Hillary dropped [relative to the ballot test question] and Trump comes up across every demographic, every geography. Hillary’s drop was between 3 and 11 percent while Trump’s increase was between 3 and 7 percent. This pattern existed everywhere from Pennsylvania to Nevada to Utah to Georgia, and it was a constant.
So, the public has been right all along. The polls are wrong, because you’re not asking the right people the right questions. That is happening, mostly, because we don’t want to tell you. Why? Could it be that we lump you in with the media, and don’t trust you? You browbeat everyone who doesn’t share your views as hateful, sexist, bigoted a–holes. And then you ask us if we are such a person.
What could possibly go wrong?
