bentway, why shy voters. because vocal assholes of the mrs. impeached serial sexual predator rapist enabler cult are nasty, loud and basically  annoying. you have taken the public dialog to this place. have a nice day.
‘Shy’ voters: the secret of Trump’s success
‘A vote for Trump was like eating ice-cream laced with whisky for breakfast — something people did not want to admit to’
by: Gillian Tett
Last week, UBS released a survey of 1,200 of its American clients and their attitudes towards the US election. It revealed some striking insights — after the election, for example, the proportion of investors who were bullish about US stocks jumped from 25 per cent to 53 per cent, while those who were bullish about growth rose from 39 per cent to 48 per cent. There was, however, an even more important detail: 36 per cent of respondents said that they did not tell their friends and family who they voted for, because they wanted to “fend off arguments or avoid judgment”.
Yes, you read that right. Among these wealthy and (presumably) educated UBS clients, more than one-third were apparently too nervous or embarrassed to reveal their election choice. Call it, if you like, a plague of squeamish silence.
Sadly, UBS does not have any long-term data with which to compare this result (I checked), and since the sample is tiny, it may be very biased. But I suspect the result points to a bigger pattern — and one that may help explain why Trump won, in stark contrast to the pollsters’ predictions.
As I criss-crossed the US this past year, I often heard middle-class, professional people tell me — with slightly embarrassed smiles — that they “understood” the appeal of Trump’s promises about change. Yes, their comments were typically laced with distaste for his aggressive persona and words — you only have to look at his outburst against Saturday Night Live to see why his tweets make people wince. But what struck me on my travels was that people voting for Hillary Clinton were rarely embarrassed to admit to it. Instead, they were resigned or dutiful. In political terms, a vote for Clinton seemed akin to eating spinach. A vote for Trump, however, was more like eating ice-cream laced with whisky for breakfast — something that establishment people did not want to admit to.
I suspect that this reticence will last for some time. Last week, I travelled to Minneapolis (for the annual meeting of the American Anthropological Association) and discovered that the local media were gripped by a debate about how to handle family gatherings amid all the political poison unleashed by the Trump win.
Some people feel so angry that they are taking radical measures. “I sent an email to an in-law telling him that his genial hockey buddy and Trump supporter friend, Johnny, was no longer welcome on Thanksgiving!” a front-page column in Minnesota’s Star Tribune declared.
However, most writers — and advice columnists — took a different tack and decided, like the UBS respondents, that it would be better to avoid fights caused by too much honesty this Thanksgiving and Christmas. In other words, I suspect there will be lots of loaded, tactful silences around the dinner table, much as there were with the pollsters.
All of this has three important implications. First, it suggests that anybody who wants to guess how the forthcoming elections will turn out in France, Italy and the Netherlands needs to be careful about trusting poll results. Maybe voters in Europe are less shy about non-traditional choices but I doubt it.
A second lesson is that the polling industry needs to rethink the questions it asks. It is striking, for example, that the one poll that was more accurate than most was conducted by the right-leaning political consultancy the Trafalgar Group. Early on, it decided that people were lying about their voting intentions. So it started asking questions such as how respondents’ neighbours were likely to vote. Not only did this deliver a different result but it enabled Trafalgar to predict the result in both Pennsylvania and Michigan.
The third, and biggest, lesson is that pollsters and political pundits need to move beyond their obsession with complicated mathematical models, and participate in more ethnographic research into subtle cultural trends of the sort that anthropologists do (on the shame problem, for example). Of course, such an undertaking will not be easy. Ethnographic research is time-consuming and cannot be plugged neatly into spreadsheets. And while last week’s meeting of the AAA revealed some amazing, grassroots work that anthropologists are doing to understand shifting American culture, it also reminded me why so few non-anthropologists know about these insights: this breed of academic tends to be very shy about pushing their analyses into the mainstream in a timely way, especially when it comes to politics.
If nothing else, the US election has shown us that we all urgently need to relearn the art of listening — to anthropologists, mavericks, naysayers and, yes, to people with opposing opinions. I hope that anthropologists get more plugged into the polling world. But I also hope that yesterday’s “shy” voters start to talk more openly in the months ahead about why they disliked the status quo. Only then will America be truly ready for change, with or without shame.
gillian.tett@ft.com |
