Donald Trump is trailing in just about every national and swing-state poll out there, but that’s OK. His new campaign manager is also a pollster, so when she unskews the polls, she can make it sound somewhat more convincing than the average poll-unskewer. Kellyanne Conway is essentially arguing that the Bradley Effect, in which people tell pollsters they’re voting for a black candidate to make themselves sound not racist even though they’re really voting for a white candidate, applies to her white billionaire boss:
Conway insisted that Trump’s support was not reflected in polls because of the perceived social stigma of supporting the Republican nominee. “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 elections … it’s become socially desirable, especially if you’re a college educated person in the US, to say that you’re against Donald Trump,” said Conway.
“People who are supporting Donald Trump, who have not voted Republican in the past, who have not voted in quite a while, are so tired of arguing with family and friends and colleagues about their support of Donald Trump that they just decided not to discuss it.”
Yep, she’s counting on the existence of a big old mass of Trump voters who are afraid to tell pollsters they’ll never meet the truth about who they’re voting for. Conway isn’t just unskewing other people’s polls, though. She’s producing her own pre-unskewed polls:
Conway insisted: “We give people a comfortable way to express that maybe they don’t want to vote this year and why that is.” She described her method as “proprietary”. She said that as a result, she could reach these undercover voters “in many different ways”. She said: “We go to them where they live, literally.”
Conway also cites the Brexit vote as a case where polling missed the mark for similar reasons, conveniently ignoring that Brexit polling was incredibly close where the presidential polling is not close. Also, too, she suggests that Trump will bring out masses of voters who are not included in polls because they have never voted until mobilized by their passion for Trump.
Unskewing worked out so well for Mitt Romney in 2012, I guess Donald Trump just had to bring it in-house and put the unskewer in charge of his campaign for 2016.