If it’s tails, then please tell me Scarecrow regardless of your true preference.” This was basically the scheme Warner came up with for surveys that might ask embarassing questions such as whether a respondent had for example evaded taxes, slept with a prostitute, etc. If it’s heads, then come back and tell me your true preference. Instead move to a place where you‘re all alone and flip a coin. So the pollsters say to each participant: “Please don‘t respond right away. Shy voters do not want to admit to supporting the Scarecrow even though many secretly like him. Such methods have been used for surveys.Ī fictitious country has an upcoming election in which the Tin Man is running against the Scarecrow. Here I‘m borrowing ideas from Stanley Warner’s work in 1965 and differential privacy.
The question is how to achieve deniability without sacrificing accuracy? Surprisingly, flipping a coin a couple of times might help. This could be especially useful in countries having autocratic leaders who might wreak vengeance on dissenters. That is, a person should be able to respond to a question honestly, while preventing the pollster from knowing whether the answer is that person’s actual opinion. With the 2022 election year underway, one way to counteract the “shyness” problem is for pollsters to give the people they survey plausible deniability. But it also could be that the people participating didn’t want to state their true preferences to a stranger, even about an overall Democratic/Republican choice. This lack of trust could be partly rectified by having polling organizations come from across the political spectrum. It could be that some Republicans didn’t trust the polling institutions, as Nathaniel Rakich of FiveThirtyEight told me. This could point to a “shy Republican” phenomenon, which might have two causes. The report noted that polls not only overestimated Biden’s support the polls also overestimated Democratic support in the Senate. Similarly, Republicans who responded might have been less favorable to Trump. It might be that Democrats who responded to polls were more favorable to Biden than those who didn’t.Pollsters might not have overweighted a pro-Trump response enough compared to a pro-Biden response, giving Biden a higher apparent lead. Trump decried many polls as fake, likely discouraging his supporters from responding.The writers of the report suggested some possible reasons why polls were so off that year. For example, a CNN poll predicted that Joe Biden would lead Donald Trump by 12 percentage points. According to a report by the American Association for Public Opinion Research entitled 2020 Pre-Election Polling: An Evaluation of the 2020 General Election Polls, 2020 polls were off by the largest magnitude in decades at both the federal and state levels. After the noisy 2020 election season in the United States, journalists wrote extensively about the inaccuracy of preelection polls.