BY JONATHAN JAKUBOWSKI AND CHRISTOS A. MAKRIDIS, OPINION CONTRIBUTORS —
THE VIEWS EXPRESSED BY CONTRIBUTORS ARE THEIR OWN AND NOT THE VIEW OF THE HILL.COM
A select group of writers from The Hill predict that President Trump is going to win the 2020 presidential election — and win big.
Although the nationwide majority of the polls suggest that Democratic presidential nomineeJoe Biden is leading, or at best that it is close, those polls suffer from at least three problems.
We observe first, the tone of the questions. There is significant evidence from behavioral psychology that suggests that the way a question is framed predetermines the range of potential answers. In fact, Gallup has found that respondents can answer very differently to questions with the same topic even in the same survey based on the language that’s used. And the use of metaphors can even dwarf the importance of preexisting differences between Republicans and Democrats.
It is widely known that one of the reasons respondents do that is because of a tendency to give socially desirable answers, which was the case especially during the 2016 election. Most people don’t like confrontation, so the easiest, albeit not necessarily the best, solution is to avoid it. Right now, saying that you’re voting for Trump/Pence is often not the socially desirable answer. In fact, a recent poll by the Cato Institute suggests that nearly two-thirds of Americans say that the political climate is sufficiently harsh that they don’t want to give their genuine opinion about politics.
See More: TheHill.com