The Nonresponse To Donald Trump

Every good survey taker knows to be aware of tendencies in human nature that can corrupt their findings, enough sometimes to create a backward impression about the state of reality. Sometimes it’s because people say things that aren’t true. People who like to be agreeable create “acquiescence bias.” People who like to fit in create “social desirability bias.” But sometimes it’s because whole classes of people make themselves unavailable.

This is called “nonresponse bias.”

The idea is that bad news or good news or some other ambient factor can skew survey findings. When Barack Obama lost his first re-election debate to Mitt Romney, polls briefly inverted, to show a small Romney lead. Democrats naturally panicked, but… it was almost certainly illusory. It wasn’t the case that millions of voters who’d planned to vote for Obama became persuaded by the debate to switch their allegiances. It was that Obama supporters became demoralized, Romney supporters became energized, and the combination had a statistically meaningful effect on who was willing to accept calls from pollsters. Romney voters were pumped. Obama voters went to ground.

In this way, nonresponse bias can cause people who make decisions and form opinions based on survey data to badly misread the true state of affairs.

Nonresponse bias may have helped Donald Trump become president, twice. Polling Trump can be a challenge, because he and the GOP have trained American conservatives to distrust all sources of independent authority, including pollsters. It’s hard, in general, to get them to engage with people and institutions they don’t know and trust.

In a more direct way, the publication of the Access Hollywood tape depressed his polling much more than his organic support. He surely lost some voters, but what he lost more than anything is people who were willing to tell pollsters they intended to vote for him. For most of October 2016, it really seemed like he was cooked.

That widespread assumption wasn’t an inert factoid. It affected behavior on a national scale. Would James Comey have re-entered the fray of the election if it seemed like Trump was only two points behind instead of six or seven or eight or nine? What about swing voters who feared Trump but had hated Hillary Clinton on a personal level for years? Would 80,000 of them in the three Blue Wall states have stayed home or voted third party if they’d had a more accurate sense of how close the election was?

Nonresponse bias is powerful and confounding. And there’s no reason to assume that its effects are only detectable in poll results. It’s worth asking whether something analogous to nonresponse bias can help explain the brutal last year of American politics: why Trump seemed so unstoppable; why the opposition felt so helpless; and whether we can shake off those doldrums in a lasting and meaningful way, before it’s too late.

Earlier this week I argued Trump has lost the culture. Not that we can pinpoint the moment when the worm turned, but that a confluence of recent events wouldn’t have happened to someone truly in sync with the public: the collapse of Trump’s approval ratings; the slowly growing willingness of people, in his own party and in the culture at large, to speak out against him; the failed Republican culture war against the Super Bowl.

The essay struck a chord, but one of its shortcomings in hindsight is the implicit conceit that Trump had won the culture in the first place.

This is a piece of conventional wisdom that, as far as I am aware, has no prominent dissenters. When Trump won the election, the political elite interpreted it as a definitive cultural verdict, which is in part how our institutional leaders ended up treating a 49.8 plurality in the popular vote as a landslide.

That is to say, it had a profound effect on how we understood our society and fellow citizens, and—for impressionable people—a motive effect on who they chose to associate themselves with and why.