This is my first foray into this forum and it has been a topic that I've been thinking about for awhile. It also very prominently surfaced again at the last Australian federal election.
Just as some background for the Australian context, there were some 50 opinion polls before the federal election last Saturday that had the conservatives behind. I've illustrated it below:
Coming up to election day, the opinion polls had been getting closer to the point that the conservatives were only 51-49 behind but nearly all the pundits still thought the Labor party (i.e. the progressives) were going to win. I commented more than 2 weeks before the election in the 2 plus 2 thread on the online poker ban thread for Australia that:
Quote:
Originally Posted by bundy5
They aren't as heavy favorites as the bookies make them out to be.
Latest Newspoll poll has them in front 51-49 and when you factor in that the incumbents tend to get maybe a 1% to 1.5% leg up on election day then I think it is a lot closer than what the experts are saying.
Also have to remember that if you are looking at outright numbers that if One Nation and the Palmer United Party (and Katter Australia Party and any other conservative minor party) get a primary vote that is higher than the greens and the Coalition primary is higher than Labor then you know it is going to be a close race.
https://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/s...postcount=3973
But that wasn't a complete picture of the reasons why I thought the opinion polling would be different on election day. Something that I think should be more widely acknowledged, especially by the progressives out there, that there is a fear amongst certain voters that they don't wish for their views to be known (i.e. they won't answer pollsters questions) but more importantly they are willing to give views that don't truly represent what they are going to do at the ballot box.
These are the people that I call the "quiet conservatives" (Scott Morrison who won for the conservatives calls them the "quiet Australians").
So I'd like to ask:
1. whether others think this is a problem that I have identified (we saw what happened with the 2016 US presidential opinion polling too not to mention with the last UK elections and Brexit) and
2. if so, why are these people not engaging willingly or truthfully in the political debate and what's the answer.
A useful article it appears on topic is this one:
http://newsroom.kpmg.com.au/why-were...ion-pre-polls/