Republican presidential contender Donald Trump is leading the GOP pack in most national and early voting states, but some of those polls could be quite misleading, according to researchers at the Morning Consult who believe many respondents are too embarrassed to admit they support the controversial candidate.
The Morning Consult compared Trump's performance in the polls and found that he generally does better in automated phone polls and online polls than he does in more traditional polls conducted over the phone by live pollsters.
In online surveys, Trump tends to get the support of nearly four-in-10 Republican voters, while in telephone polls, he usually garners the backing of one-third or fewer, according to the Los Angeles Times.
In an attempt to explain the phenomena, the Morning Consult interviewed 2,397 registered Republicans and Republican-leaning independents over a week in mid-December using three different methods. The first was a traditional telephone survey with live interviewers calling landlines and cellphones, the second was an online survey and the third was over the phone with an interactive automated voice response technique.
Researchers found that "voters are about six points more likely to support Trump when they're taking the poll online when they're talking to a live interviewer," said Kyle Dropp, executive director of Morning Consult and political scientist at Dartmouth University, reports The Daily Mail. "People are slightly less likely to say that they support him when they're talking to a live human" than when they are taking the poll in the "anonymous environment" of an online survey.
Dropp and his team believes the findings can be explained by what is known as a "social desirability bias," which occurs when people are embarrassed to confess unpopular opinions to a pollster out of fear that their support will be viewed as a socially unacceptable decision.
Highly-educated and engaged Republican voters are much more hesitant to admit their support for Trump in live telephone polls, while blue-collar voters don't feel nearly as embarrassed about supporting Trump.
"Among adults with a bachelor's degree or postgraduate degree, Trump performs about 10 percentage points better online than via live telephone," Dropp said. "And, among adults with some college, Trump performs more than 10 percentage points better online. Conversely, Republicans with a high school education or less favored Trump on the phone over online."
Dropp said the findings suggest that online polls, in which Trump usually has larger leads, are the more accurate measure of how people would cast their ballot in the voting booth. "It's our sense that a lot of polls are under-reporting Trump's overall support," he said.
The social desirability bias was also at play when Ronald Reagan and Arnold Schwarzenegger ran for governor, as a certain segments of the electorate did not want to publicly support an actor, resulting in them underperforming in the polls, according to The Washington Post.
