A well-documented phenomenon in public opinion polling is the tendency of a certain slice of respondents to mis-recall their vote in the previous presidential election, invariably always accumulating to the winner. This is no common that, in a Wednesday blog post elections egghead Lakshya Jain writes that “winner’s recall” is a widely understood term in the industry.

Obviously this is only observed when the respondents are named, known, and polled again at a later time, which is exactly how Jain now reports that because “the day after the 2024 election, our polling partner Verasight collected data from every respondent in its panel about whom they voted for” and did so again each time they re-engaged, that now he’s sharing a noticeable dropoff.

“Here’s what we’re finding: six percent of Trump voters — as determined by the recorded vote data we have, which we’ll treat as the ground truth — don’t even admit to voting for him in the last election,” Jain writes of his 12,180 respondents. “Approximately 15 percent of Trump’s 2024 voters disapproved of his job performance. Among this group, almost one in four didn’t admit to having voted for the president. Thirteen percent even falsely claimed to have voted for Kamala Harris, while 12 percent claimed they actually didn’t vote at all.” A table in the article shows this offset by 1.0 and 2.3 percent of Harris voters who claimed to have voted Trump or just not voted, respectively.