Pretty much every time someone posts about Biden having good poll results, someone one else will immediately post about how this is going to lead to complacency and then people won’t vote. But has anyone actually studied this? I’m looking for real data, not just anecdotes.
This may not be the exact same question you’re asking, but this article says:
“pre-election polls do not exhibit the detrimental welfare effects that extant theoretical work predicts. They lead to more participation by the expected majority and generate more landslide elections.”
As best as I can figure out that word salad, it apparently means, “The more you believe your side will win, the likelier you are to go out and vote to make that landslide happen.”
I don’t know the answer to the OP, but I find the talk of big leads and landslides curious. To me a big lead and landslide imply something like LBJs victory in 1964 and Reagan’s victory in 1984, maybe Bush Sr in1992 as well. I doubt we’ll get anywhere close to that this year, regardless of who wins.
There was a lot of consternation after the 1996 election due to the fact that turnout was only 49%. I believe a number of studies have shown that the lower turnout may indeed have been due to the fact that the election was seen as being a fait accompli: many voters assumed Clinton was going to win easily, and decided not to bother voting.
Of course, this year is not 1996, and after what happened in the last election, I don’t think complacency will be nearly as much of a problem as otherwise.
That and the Republican on the ballot was Bob Dole, who even back then was the old boring guy who a lot of people could not bother to get off the couch and go vote for.
Yeah, the Republicans in that cycle kinda shot their wad trying to get Colin Powell to run against Clinton. When he declined to run they nominated Dole almost out of a sense of obligation.
Back in the days when the name-brand media ruled the airwaves and CNN, Fox, and social media didn’t exist there was one very robust effect seen in every presidential election year.
As the polls closed back east there were still 3 more hours of polling on the west coast and 5 hours in Hawaii. If the networks promptly called the presidential election for one or another side, voting quickly subsided in the later time zones. If they didn’t, it didn’t.
Which led to a mutually agreed policy by the Big 3 networks to not do that until the polls had closed in Hawaii. Which policy became moot in this modern era of every wannabe pundit w a TwitFace account or a website trying to draw clicks by doing real time tracking.