Discovered: Who And Why--The Shy Trump Voter

Steve Hayward over at Powerline draws attention to fascinating new information on the shy Trump demographic:

The biggest surprise for the mainstream media and the conventional pollsters was that there were a significant number of “shy Trump voters.” Who were these voters? One segment was non-white voters, especially Hispanics but also blacks. Trump received the largest share of the non-white vote in 60 years. Liberals are spinning furiously to explain this away. More on this later on.

The other group of shy Trump voters appear to have been . . . suburban college educated women—the group the mainstream media claimed Trump had permanently alienated. Exit polls from both Public Opinion Strategies and the Edison Poll finds that Trump got half or more of this group. This shift helps explain why Republicans outperformed especially in House races. Even the GOP did not pick up on this.

The source of this new knowledge? Josh Kraushaar, at National Journal. I'll get to Kraushaar, but first I want to excerpt an article that Kraushaar links to in his own article. The article is by a political scientist:

Eric Kaufmann is Professor of Politics at Birkbeck, University of London, and author of Whiteshift: Immigration, Populism and the Future of White Majorities

And his article:

Who are the real Shy Trumpers?

Political correctness has left a cadre of white graduates unwilling to reveal their voting intention

I think you'll want to read it all, but if you doubt me here's a sample. Kaufmann begins with some general considerations regarding the problems of polling, how pollsters try to correct for those problems, and why they can't seem to do so. Then he continues:

Looking at this election’s errors — which seems to have been concentrated among white college graduates — I wonder if political correctness lies at the heart of the problem.

Political correctness refers to the policing of speech so that it conforms to cultural taboos, especially the ones concerning race, gender and sexuality. Those who wield taboos gain rhetorical power, encouraging them to stretch the meaning of concepts such as racism to encompass non-racist actions such as voting for Donald Trump.

 

Actually, by "cultural taboos" I think he's referring to power elite taboos. Or, power elite groupie shared taboos, or something like that. In this sense, the power elite is the group that is able to enforce taboos, i.e., to punish non-conformers. By identifying with the power elite and its views, the power elite groupies are empowered. We'll see more of this when we look at Kraushaar, but without the threat of some form of punishment there will be no fear of the sort that is now well documented.

 

Across all racial groups, 80% of Americans say “political correctness is a problem in our country”. Only the small “Progressive Activist” 8% of the US population largely thinks it’s not. In practice, the burden of political correctness arguably falls most heavily on university-educated Republican supporters. ...

Republican supporters with degrees tend to work in graduate-dominated environments, where organisations and peers are more likely to enforce norms of political correctness. As a result, it is highly-educated Republican supporters who are most shy about revealing their beliefs at work.

...

However, we also know that people who internalise social norms often conceal their views in online surveys. ... For instance, in a recent survey of North American academics, I found that just 23% of academics were willing to state they would discriminate against a Trump voter for a job, but the actual share when using a concealed technique called a ‘list experiment’ was 42%. Likewise, a 2010 study found that the share of white Americans willing to endorse zero immigration jumped from 39% to 60% when the question was concealed in a list, rather than asked openly.

There is also a problem of blowback among elite Republicans. Frank Luntz has also said that feedback from Trump-supporting respondents revealed considerable resentment towards pollsters, who were perceived as part of a media establishment out to misrepresent them. ...

Again, this perception is likely to be stronger among Trump-supporting graduates than Trump voters with lower education levels, who are less likely to circulate in politically-correct social environments. Research confirms that highly-educated white liberals have the most skewed perceptions of the actual views of Trump supporters, in part because their social circles tend to be politically homogeneous. The problem is worst among those most attentive to politics.

...

The exit polls, however, show that Trump ran even among white college graduates 49-49, and even had an edge among white female graduates of 50-49! This puts pre-election surveys out by a whopping 26-31 points among white graduates. ...

...

The most important effects of speech policing are often indirect, shutting down important conversations across value divides that could improve policies and reach greater consensus on hot-button issues such as immigration, education or policing.

OK, now we turn to Kraushaar. Kraushaar isn't so concerned with polling. Rather, he wants to identify just who these people are--Kaufmann has already told us--and WHY they're shy about expressing their views. Kaufmann has explained that, too, but Kraushaar allows them to express it in their own words. See if you can identify with it. Is it possible that the Dems are still cruising for a major bruising? All those angry people can't be happy with having their vote stolen.

Post-election Public Opinion Strategies (R) survey: The biggest shy Trump" constituency: college-educated white women.

64% of those who fit the shy Trump voter (4% of the overall electorate) were women, according to the survey.