--- In [email protected], Sal Sunshine <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > On Feb 29, 2008, at 6:56 PM, bob_brigante wrote: > > > People do try to give socially desirable answers when polled (they do > > not see it as lying). Most middle-class whites don't want to give the > > appearance of being wary of racial minorities or of women as leaders > > (even when their names are not going to be published), > > What nonsense. Anonymous polls are just that. While a few might > lie, most would not, there wouldn't be any reason to.
Oh, sure there would. Here's this pollster they're talking to, who presumably has his/her finger on the pulse of the nation, and they want the pollster to associate them in his/her mind with the "right" side of things. In the voting booth, in contrast, *nobody* knows who they've voted for. It's a known effect, actually, even has a name, the Bradley effect. There have been several elections where one candidate was white and the other black, in which pre-election polls and even exit polls showed the black candidate winning, but when the votes were counted, the white candidate won. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bradley_effect Some pollsters and analysts dispute it, but more in terms of its being big enough to cause an upset than whether it actually exists. There was speculation that this is what happened in New Hampshire, when Obama was widely expected to win but Hillary beat him solidly. When they looked more closely at the results, it turned out that the polls had given him very close to the percentage of votes that he actually won. The difference was that the vast majority of voters who who were undecided at the time the polls were taken broke for Hillary. So the polls weren't incorrect, they just hadn't been able to register the size of the vote for her because people made up their minds at the last minute.
