By Glynn Wilson –

Could it be that the national public opinion pundits are at it again, over estimating the support for Democrat Joe Biden and underestimating the stealth support for reelecting President Donald Trump?

Before I could grab the results from the latest Morning Consult poll and write a story about it, New York Times public opinion expert Nate Cohn — who you may recall called the 2016 election “a lock” for Hillary Clinton in the weeks leading up to the election — has now written a new analysis calling all the polling news good news for Biden.

Biden still holds a 10 point lead in the polls of the national popular vote, well outside the margin of error, with 42 days to go until Nov. 3. Biden also leads in some of the key battleground states, but some of those races are within the margin of error.

“The race is more stable than we thought,” Cohn says. “A poll that had seemed to show a shifting race really didn’t show much change at all.”

The Upshot on Today’s Polls

There has been no shortage of articles about the possibility that President Trump’s supporters are part of a “silent majority” (Nixon’s term) that, as a group, do not reveal their true voting intention to pollsters, he says. Well the Morning Consult decided to put the theory to the test, and released the results of a new experiment on Monday.

Are There ‘Shy Trump’ Voters In 2020?

“Nope, still no shy Trump voters,” Cohn says, using the new terminology of the shy voter who doesn’t answer the questions of pollsters on the phone — or doesn’t tell the truth.

Back in the 1990s, we started referring to this phenomenon as a “stealth campaign,” and it proved pollsters wrong back in 1994 when Jim Folsom Jr. was running for reelection as governor of Alabama but was defeated in an upset by conservative Fob James, even though the polls had Folsom with a comfortable lead. It was then conservative Christians who refused to talk to pollsters on the phone, and oh yeah, it was in some ways conservative Christians who put Trump over the top in 2016, although I don’t see any pundits talking much about that now.

1994 Alabama gubernatorial election

Morning Consult

In the Morning Consult experiment, the survey research team found a group of voters online, then conducted the survey with half of the respondents over the phone and the other half online. If voters were afraid to divulge their support for the president, the theory went, perhaps Trump would have more support online, where supporters wouldn’t have to express their views to a person on the phone.

The survey found that it didn’t make much of a difference, Cohn says, although it did make a difference for some socially awkward or possibly embarrassing questions, like those about people’s personal finances or attitudes about discrimination.

“It’s still possible that such voters exist,” he admits. “Even if they don’t, the polls can be wrong for all sorts of other reasons. But there’s really just no serious evidence to support the idea that these voters exist in meaningful numbers, and there was no such evidence in 2016, either.”

So he concludes:

“State of the race at the end of the day: It still seems like a comfortable Biden lead.”

Despite trailing in most national public opinion polls, President Donald Trump regularly refers to a “silent majority” of Americans who he expects to vote for him on Election Day, the Morning Consult report says.

“But how many voters are reluctant to publicly share their opinion about the president?”

Building on 2015 and 2016 research, Morning Consult recently conducted a study of more than 2,400 likely voters to determine if the “shy Trump” voter phenomenon is affecting polling in the 2020 election. The study also examined whether social desirability bias is at play on a range of topics that have been particularly prevalent this year.

To conduct the study, all survey respondents answered a set of demographic questions online and then were randomly assigned to answer a brief, identical set of questions about politics and society either online or via a live telephone interview. By comparing these live telephone interviews with online responses, they were able to identify where social desirability bias was in effect.

“There was clear evidence that voters are hesitant to express their opinions on discrimination, protests and personal finances during a live telephone interview,” they conclude. “And while there is no indication that ‘shy voters’ are affecting the overall national popular vote to a statistically significant degree, nuances in the data leave open the possibility that there could be effects at the margins for both Trump and Biden.”

Among all likely voters, Joe Biden and Donald Trump receive a similar level of support online and via phone, they say. Biden received 55 percent support to Trump’s 45 percent support among those who took the survey online and Biden received 56 percent support to Trump’s 44 percent among phone respondents.

In prior studies, the differences between phone and online are larger among adults with higher levels of formal education and those with higher incomes.

“On education, we find limited evidence for this in the 2020 race,” they say.

Among income levels, there is evidence of a “mode effect.”

Trump receives lower support on the phone than online among those making $75,000 or more each year, whereas Biden receives lower support on the phone than online among households earning less than $35,000 annually.

“However, differences between income groups did not reach statistical significance,” they conclude. “When taken together, differences between subgroups did not change the overall finding that President Donald Trump lagged behind Joe Biden by 10 percentage points in both online and phone interviews.”

When they first explored the “shy Trump” voter hypothesis in 2015, they found that Republican primary voters were 6 percentage points less likely to say they supported Donald Trump when interviewed on the phone compared with online. Trump was considered a pariah back then even by other Republicans, so that’s not surprising. But after he won the nomination, people supporting him apparently came out of the closet, showing “that effect had vanished among registered voters.”

Let me humbly suggest that if they really want to test this theory, they should ask if voters consider themselves to be “conservative” and “Christian,” and ask how they feel about the social science of polling.

The other factor that doomed Clinton in 2016 was the lack of votes from African American males in urban centers like Milwaukee Wisconsin, Detroit Michigan and Pittsburg Pennsylvania. I’m not seeing any evidence that these voters are more likely to turn out for Biden than they were for Clinton, although they did turn out in great numbers for Obama in 2008 and 2012.

We know that traditional liberals and mainstream Democrats are outraged by Trump and will turn out for Biden, and that many suburban women — even traditionally conservative and Republican women — will not vote for Trump’s reelection.

What we don’t really know is if anything Trump has done will hurt him with conservative Christians this time, or whether black males plan to turn out to vote for Biden.

Those two demographics could well decide this election, in the swing battleground states.

North Carolina Holds the Key

In another New York Times story out today, one correspondent says the entire race could come down to what happens in North Carolina.

The White House, Senate and Supreme Court Could All Hinge on North Carolina

Dog help us all everyone.