Marist poll director Lee Miringoff on Friday dismissed the idea that there were silent supporters of President Trump in the 2016 presidential election.
“If you were listening on the phones to real people, the shy Trump voter may not have existed. They’re not a shy group,” Miringoff told Hill.TV’s Joe Concha on “What America’s Thinking.”
Miringoff was responding to Morning Consult reporter Cameron Easley, who said people were more likely to admit that they supported Trump in an online poll.
“Morning Consult was one of the first polling outlets to recognize how real Trump support was. And another thing getting into live caller polls versus online polls is that we actually found something, it’s called social desirability bias,” Easley said.
“Where someone was far more likely to admit in an online poll that they supported President Trump over one of the Republican contenders,” he continued.
The idea that there were silent Trump voters was one of the possibilities used to explain Trump’s surprise victory over Hillary Clinton in 2016, when almost all polling predicted a Democratic victory.
An analysis released last year by the American Association for Public Opinion Research found that the biggest reason explaining why pollsters missed the mark in 2016 was state-level polling underestimating Trump’s support in Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin.
Trump was able to flip all three of the historically blue states.
— Julia Manchester
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