For some time now, Donald Trump’s advisers have sought to explain why he’s trailing Hillary Clinton in the polls by arguing that there’s a sizable group of people out there who will vote for him on election day but are too embarrassed to admit this to pollsters. Putting aside what that would say about Trump even if it were true, professional pollsters have treated the idea with skepticism.
But now new senior Trump adviser Kellyanne Conway has taken this theory to a new level in an interview with a British TV station. The interview has quite a few nuggets that are worth dwelling on, not simply for their entertainment value, but for the real insights they offer into how the Trump campaign views the race right now.
CNN has a transcript of the interview. The first claim features Conway explaining why there is this hidden Trump vote in a way I have not seen before:
“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,” she said.
The notion that college educated people in particular have a social stake in being against Trump actually says a lot. As has been widely documented, Trumpism is driving a sharp cleavage among white voters along class and cultural lines, with non-college whites supporting him overwhelmingly, even as college educated whites are repelled by him in historic numbers for a GOP nominee. Trump’s recent fake gestures towards “softening” on mass deportations, and his planned window-dressing minority outreach efforts, are all about improving his numbers among these voters, particularly those who live in the suburbs and exurbs.
Conway is almost certainly a major driver of those cosmetic changes. So when she says college educated voters support him but don’t want to admit it, she probably knows that in reality, we’re talking about college educated whites who need to be persuaded not just that supporting Trump is socially acceptable, but that Trump isn’t actually an unhinged hatemonger. These voters have to be won back, and probably won’t be in the numbers Trump needs, because he has branded himself indelibly among them with his mass deportations, Mexican wall, ban on Muslims, battle with the Khan family, and nonstop depravity and abusiveness.
It gets better when Conway is pressed by her interviewer on the dimensions of this secret pro-Trump vote:
“Have you been able to put a number on” those particular voters, asked Matt Frei, the interviewer.“Yes,” Conway replied.“What do you think it is?”“I can’t discuss it.”“Oh, come on,” Frei interjected.But Conway declined. “No, it’s a project we’re doing internally. I call it the undercover Trump voter, but it’s real.”
The number of these secret Trump voters will have to remain secret, because they are being targeted as part of a secret campaign strategy. As you may recall, Trump recently promised that he would win by “doing great in states that people aren’t thinking about.” When pressed to name these states, Trump declined.
Conway also claimed that this secret Trump voter phenomenon explains the national polling. As she put it: “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.” In other words, online polling is more trustworthy than telephone polling, at least when it comes to gauging Trump support. Obviously, this is not how professional pollsters view things.
Finally, in the interview, Conway also said this about Trump and Clinton: “Distrust of her far outweighs distaste for him right now.”
This isn’t really true, at least according to a recent Post poll, which found Trump viewed unfavorably by 63 percent of Americans, while 59 percent said Clinton is not honest and trustworthy. But putting that aside, this is an interesting window into the campaign’s thinking: The bet appears (at least ostensibly) to be that distrust of Clinton is what will enable Trump to overcome his negatives, which explains why he’s hammering away at the Clinton Foundation and email revelations, even calling for a special prosecutor.
But this elides another extremely important dynamic in this race, which is that however disliked both candidates are, large majorities view Clinton as possessing the right kind of qualities for the presidency, while equally large majorities view Trump as temperamentally unfit and unqualified for it. If Trump’s new advisers are doing anything to try to turn that around, other than getting Trump to stop insulting and abusing people, I’m not seeing it. Of course, if they’ve identified a secret Trump vote that will put him over the top, perhaps they don’t need to.
