I suspect, with no data to back me up, that is those who were ambivalent when they stepped into the polling booth that genuinely misremember. Others know they voted for the other guy, but want to be seen as one of the ‘winners’.
There are many U.S. elections I have voted in where there were two candidates for an office and I couldn’t tell you which one I voted for. Admittedly, no cases involving Presidential candidates; I’m usually pretty sure who I’m voting for in those cases.
Or the survey he’s referring to is biased. Seems hard for it not to be… did they knock on doors all across the country? If it’s based on mail or telephone responses, are people who voted for Obama more likely to respond to those?
Or, he’s misquoting the survey. If you were testing the hypothesis that people misremember voting for the winner, wouldn’t you sample a smaller area than the whole country, and then compare your results with the vote count from that area? Why would an experiment like that ever get a number meant to be compared with the whole country’s votes?
I suspect, with no data to back me up, that the latter class contains many more people than the former. (If I were that ambivalent, I wouldn’t vote for either major candidate at random; I would either vote for a minor candidate, or not vote at all. But I guess not everybody is like me.)
I suspect, with no data to back me up, that is those who were ambivalent when they stepped into the polling booth that genuinely misremember. Others know they voted for the other guy, but want to be seen as one of the ‘winners’.
There are many U.S. elections I have voted in where there were two candidates for an office and I couldn’t tell you which one I voted for. Admittedly, no cases involving Presidential candidates; I’m usually pretty sure who I’m voting for in those cases.
Or the survey he’s referring to is biased. Seems hard for it not to be… did they knock on doors all across the country? If it’s based on mail or telephone responses, are people who voted for Obama more likely to respond to those?
Or, he’s misquoting the survey. If you were testing the hypothesis that people misremember voting for the winner, wouldn’t you sample a smaller area than the whole country, and then compare your results with the vote count from that area? Why would an experiment like that ever get a number meant to be compared with the whole country’s votes?
I suspect, with no data to back me up, that the latter class contains many more people than the former. (If I were that ambivalent, I wouldn’t vote for either major candidate at random; I would either vote for a minor candidate, or not vote at all. But I guess not everybody is like me.)