Donald Trump Campaign: Polls Don’t Account for ‘Undercover Trump Voter’

Donald Trump’s new campaign head argued that many supporters aren’t showing up in polls because they are shy about making their support public.

In an interview with the U.K.’s Channel 4, recently hired campaign manager Kellyanne Conway argued that the Republican nominee is doing better in online polls than traditional landline- and cell phone-based polls.

“Donald Trump performs consistently better in online polling where a human being is not talking to another human being about what he or she may do in the election. … It’s become socially desirable, especially if you’re a college-educated person in the United States of America, to say that you’re against Donald Trump. The hidden Trump vote in this country is a very significant proposition.”

Conway, a veteran pollster, would not specify how many “undercover Trump voters” she thinks exist, saying that it is an internal project of the campaign.

In the interview, she also blamed “the American media” for not reporting on these voters by using “cherry-picked polling numbers” because they are “also bent on his destruction.”

In the RealClearPolitics average of general election polls, Clinton is up 5.4 percentage points over Trump, with recent polls of both registered voters and live voters showing leads ranging from two to eight points. That margin remains steady at 5.3 points when only online polls are counted.

The HuffPost Pollster average shows Clinton up by 7.4 points. The FiveThirtyEight polls-only forecast currently predicts Clinton will win by 7.2 points.