Biden’s lead in the USC Dornsife poll has remained fairly constant since Dornsife began daily tracking last August. Some who are critical of all polling say that many Trump supporters will not tell pollsters which candidate they support. This is called the “Shy Trump voter." Jill Darling is Survey Director for the USC Dornsife Presidential poll. She doesn’t put much weight on the concept of a “Shy Trump voter”
“There’s always been a sort of a lot of controversy about this. Is there one? Isn’t there one? We have some questions that we asked in 2016 that asked people about how comfortable they were in talking about their candidate choice with family and friends and with acquaintances and with telephone pollsters.We had about eighty five percent who said they were comfortable. So it’s not even like 100 percent of people.”
“I don’t buy into the so-called shy Trump supporter.”
That’s USC Professor Dan Schnur. He’s an expert in politics and communications.. He says that online polling, like the Dornsife Daybreak poll, encourages more honesty from participants.
Schnur founded the USC/LA Times statewide poll and yet he cautions against getting too far ahead of ourselves in terms of which candidate is winning based on polls.
“The most important thing to remember about public opinion polling is that even though we tend to rely on it as a predictor, the best public opinion polls aren’t designed to predict an outcome. The greatest value that you can get out of a poll is not learning how people are going to vote on Election Day, but rather to learn why they’re less likely to vote the way they did.”
“But, I mean, there are certain things to be looking for.”
Here again is Jill Darling, the survey director of the USC Dornsife “Daybreak” Poll. She says this year it looks like early voting is heavily Democrat. And tomorrow’s casting of the ballots might be heavily Republican. Darling says the states that do not start to count their early ballots until Tuesday are ones to watch such as Michigan and Pennsylvania.
“Those are the states that I think that if there is a possibility that Trump follows through on his, you know, what he’s been saying about challenging the vote, that that would be where he would try and stop the counting so that you’d be able to maintain the early lead that he will have from the Election Day voting.”
It could be weeks before we know who the winner is and how accurate the polls were this time around.