The 2020 US Election wasn't the first time that many people misread a political situation, and I'm sure it won't be the last. What I want to look at in this post is the way that these misreadings were a consequence of missing data - commonly known as Dark Data.
The first misreading was the polls predicting a strong result for Joe Biden and the Democratic Party. Although Biden still had a majority of the popular vote, and also a majority in the Electoral College, the margin of victory was much smaller than most polls had predicted.
A plausible explanation for this error is that the data collection on which these estimates are based systematically excludes certain types of voter, and therefore underestimated the support for Donald Trump and the Republican party. Either because these voters are less easy than others to reach by traditional polling methods (telephone calls), or because these voters are less willing than others to reveal their true voting intentions (the so-called Shy Voter).
Following errors predicting the 2016 election, polling organizations thought they had worked out how to correct these errors. It seems that they were wrong about that.
The second potential
misreading involved analysing the demographic breakdown of voters based on
exit polls, resulting in statements such as Donald Trump increased his share of the XYZ-category vote from A% to B%.
.
But given that Trump voters were more likely to vote in person and
Biden voters were more likely to vote by mail, surveys of people leaving
polling stations would be highly skewed.
The third misreading was perhaps to take social media too seriously. Ed Pilkington argues that although Trump's strongest advantage going into the election was the economy, Trump proved incapable of keeping to the economic message.
Because his modus operandi is to stimulate a positive response from his fans, as well as outrage or scorn from his enemies. He then leverages the negative response from his enemies to reinforce the loyalty of his fans. (As Judith Butler argues, this effect is linked to shame.)
As I wrote in my earlier post
What is special in Trump's case is that there are some feedback loops that strongly reinforce these particular behaviour patterns, because they have produced the desired outcomes in the recent past. Trump's worldview (Weltanschauung) causes him to pick up certain signals and ignore others.Why this stupid behaviour? (October 2017)
Trump has a remarkable ability to create noise on social media, and he has often used this noise to his own advantage. He had a refined sense of what would play well to his core audience, and would rattle his core opponents, because those were the two categories that reacted on social media to his every move. But he appears to have had rather less sense of what mattered to those who didn't belong to either of these categories, and didn't broadcast their partisan views at every opportunity.
Judith Butler, Is the show finally over for Donald Trump? (The Guardian, 5 November 2020)
Ed Pilkington, Loser: Donald Trump derided defeat – now he must live with it (The Guardian, 11 November 2020)
Zack Stanton, People Are Going To Be Shocked
: Return of the Shy
Trump Voter? (Politico, 29 October 2020)
Related posts: Why this stupid behaviour? (October 2017), Dark Data (February 2020)
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