Trump campaign manager: Here’s why we think the polls are wrong

Donald Trump’s campaign manager, Kellyanne Conway, argued that polls showing her candidate losing are missing the “undercover Trump voter” who is embarrassed to admit support for the Republican nominee.

“Our internal polling is proprietary and confidential so I won’t discuss it,” Conway said, according to an interview transcript published earlier this week by the British Channel 4 network. “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 elections,” she continued.

Hillary Clinton has led Trump in all of the recent major public polls of the national election. On Wednesday afternoon, the RealClearPolitics average of national polls gave the Democrat a 6-point edge over Trump.

Conway, a pollster by trade, asserted that the social pressure of a live phone conversation led some Trump supporters to hide their support. She said it’s “become socially desirable especially if you’re a college [educated] person in the USA to say that you’re against Donald Trump.”

On the other hand, phone surveys can sometimes underestimate Democratic-leaning groups, such as younger voters and racial minorities, who are less likely to have landlines and are more difficult to reach.

There are some professional pollsters who conduct online-only surveys, and they indeed find Trump doing a bit better, according to poll expert Nate Silver of FiveThirtyEight. Silver noted on his site Tuesday that “traditional landline telephone polls have been Clinton-leaning as a group, although not uniformly.” His forecast model, which averages both online and traditional phone surveys based on historical accuracy and other factors, on Wednesday gave Clinton an 85 percent chance of prevailing in November.

It’s not uncommon for boosters of a presidential candidate to claim that the polls are systemically flawed when their candidate is down. In 2012, some Mitt Romney supporters infamously asserted that media organizations’ polls were inaccurately “skewed” in President Obama’s favor. But Obama actually outperformed his public poll numbers on Election Day.