At the end of 2008, as President Bush was on his way out, bloggers on the left made some hay of an incidental poll finding that fewer people would admit to voting for Bush than the vote total shows actually did.
Since then I’ve seen at least one poll make a similar case about President Obama during a patch of unpopularity. (Ok, that was just a Newsmax poll, but still.) And actually, as far as demonstrating the phenomenon, people also lied (misreported?) to take credit for having voted for Obama (or to deny voting for McCain/Palin [and also about having voted at all]).
The Slate piece linked in the previous sentence offers a lot of possible explanations for what’s going on, but since this is a blog post with “conjecture” in the headline and we’ve already acknowledged that amateur beard stroking over a single piece of a single poll won’t be putting any rockets into orbit*, I’m going to go out on a limb and postulate that Americans prefer to be associated with winners and distance themselves from losers (with allowance for cheering for underdogs).
And so while I was poking through the PPP poll about Ron Paul’s Iowa surge* I was interested to note how Iowans reported their 2008 voting.
Just for the record, here are the actual 2008 Iowa caucus results:









