A “shy voter” is one who does not admit to supporting a certain candidate to pollsters, but still votes for that candidate in the election.
Origin of “Shy Voter”
The term comes from the “Shy Tory Effect,” a phenomenon that found British conservatives greatly outperforming their poll numbers.
The Shy Tory Effect is typically seen in elections where there is a strong social or cultural divide between supporters of the Conservative party and other political parties. In these situations, Tory voters may be less likely to express their support for the party publicly, leading to a discrepancy between the opinions expressed in opinion polls and the actual election results.
Shy voters seem to not make up a large percentage of the voting population, and have not been found to affect an election.
However, the idea of the “shy Trump voter” was talked about in the 2016 election as a means to explain how Trump outperformed polls.
As Harry Enten explains:
The ‘shy Trump’ theory relies on the notion of social desirability bias— the idea that people are reluctant to reveal unpopular opinions. So if the theory is right, we would have expected to see Trump outperform his polls the most in places where he is least popular — and where the stigma against admitting support for Trump would presumably be greatest…
But actual election results indicate that the opposite happened: Trump outperformed his polls by the greatest margin in red states, where he was quite popular.
Use of “Shy Voter” in a sentence
- The political campaign is using targeted advertising to try to overcome the shy voter phenomenon and reach more potential supporters.
- The opinion pollster found that many respondents were reluctant to express their true political views, potentially due to the shy voter effect.
- The political analyst attributed the unexpectedly strong showing by the Conservative party to a significant number of shy voters who had not been captured in the opinion polls.