Always Silent? Exploring Contextual Conditions for Nonresponses to Vote Intention Questions at the 2020 U.S. Presidential Election.

This article examines how local political climate influences survey respondents' willingness to disclose their vote intentions in the 2020 U.S. presidential election, focusing on the phenomenon of vote intention nonresponse. Using logistic regression analyses on data from the 2020 Cooperative Election Study matched with 2016 county-level presidential election results from the MIT Election Data and Science Lab, the study finds that conservative-leaning voters are more likely to withhold their vote preference in counties where Democratic support was stronger, consistent with a social desirability bias or "spiral of silence" effect. Individual factors such as political interest, ideology, and ethnicity also affect nonresponse rates, but the interaction between ideology and local partisan context is key to understanding reticence in vote disclosure. The findings highlight the importance of considering both individual and contextual factors in electoral survey research and suggest that social pressures in politically heterogeneous environments may contribute to polling inaccuracies.