Hidden codebook items for Hartnett and Haver 2022 "Unconditional support for Trump's resistance prior to Election Day"

PS: Political Science & Politics recently published Hartnett and Haver 2022 "Unconditional support for Trump's resistance prior to Election Day".

Hartnett and Haver 2022 reported on an experiment conducted in October 2020 in which likely Trump voters were asked to consider the hypothetical of a Biden win in the Electoral College and in the popular vote, with a Biden popular vote percentage point win randomly assigned to be from 1 percentage point through 15 percentage points. These likely Trump voters were then asked whether the Trump campaign should resist or concede.

Data were collected before the election, but Hartnett and Haver 2022 did not report anything about a corresponding experiment involving likely Biden voters. Hartnett and Haver 2022 discussed a Reuters/Ipsos poll that "found that 41% of likely Trump voters would not accept a Biden victory and 16% of all likely Trump voters 'would engage in street protests or even violence' (Kahn 2020)". The Kahn 2020 source indicates that the corresponding percentages for Biden voters for a Trump victory were 43% and 22%, so it didn't seem like there was a good reason to not include a parallel experiment for Biden voters, especially because data on only Trump voters wouldn't permit valid inferences about the characteristics on which Trump voters were distinctive.

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But text for a somewhat corresponding experiment involving likely Biden voters is hidden in the Hartnett and Haver 2022 codebook under white boxes or something like that. The text of the hidden items can be highlighted, copied, and pasted from the bottom of pages 19 and 20 of the codebook PDF (or more hidden text can be copied, using ctrl+A, then ctrl-C, and then pasted with ctrl-V).

The hidden codebook text indicates that the hartnett_haver block of the survey had a "bidenlose" item that asked likely Biden voters whether, if Biden wins the popular vote by the randomized percentage points and Trump wins the electoral college, the Biden campaign should "Resist the results of the election in any way possible" or "Concede defeat".

There might be an innocent explanation for Hartnett and Haver 2022 not reporting the results for those items, but that innocent explanation hasn't been shared with me yet on Twitter. Maybe Hartnett and Haver 2022 have a manuscript in progress about the "bidenlose" item.

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NOTES

1. Hartnett and Haver 2022 seems to be the survey that Emily Badger at the New York Times referred to as "another recent survey experiment conducted by Brian Schaffner, Alexandra Haver and Brendan Hartnett at Tufts". The copied-and-pasted codebook text indicates that this was for the "2020 Tufts Class Survey".

2. On page 18 of the Hartnett and Haver 2022 codebook, above the hidden item about socialism, part of the text of the "certain advantages" item is missing, which seems to be a should-be-obvious indication that text has been covered.

3. The codebook seems to be missing pages of the full survey: in the copied-and-pasted text, page numbers jump from "Page 21 of 43" to "Page 24 of 43" to "Page 31 of 43" to "Page 33 of 43". Presumably at least some missing items were for other members of the Tufts class, although I'm not sure what happened to page 32, which seems to be part of the hartnett_haver block that started on page 31 and ended on page 33.

4. The dataset for Hartnett and Haver 2022 includes a popular vote percentage point win from 1 percentage point through 15 percentage points assigned to likely Biden voters, but the dataset has no data on a resist-or-concede outcome or on a follow-up open-ended item.