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Can Donald Trump “unskew” reality?

AFP/Getty Images

The running narrative on the right wing is that Trump in November could defy all the polls, which universally show he’s losing. This is because the vast throngs of people who support Trump just aren’t being polled. 

This isn’t even an attempt to mathematically “unskew” a poll by shifting around the party-ID numbers, as was commonly practiced by conservatives in 2012. This is just a blanket statement that the polls are wrong—because the polls are wrong. 

Here we have campaign manager Kellyanne Conway citing what she calls “the undercover Trump voter.”

“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,” she argued. “It’s because it’s become socially desirable, if you’re a college educated person in the United States of America, to say that you’re against Donald Trump.”

Thing is, even the reputable online polls still have Trump losing. Rush Limbaugh is also getting in on the action:

Call ’em the silent majority, the silent number or whatever. We’re gonna find in November just how many of them there are. We’re gonna find out in November how many of them show up and vote. We’re gonna find out a lot of things in November, ’cause I guarantee you these people are not being polled. They’re not being reached. And in an even greater sense the people responsible for polling and the editors and producers of major media networks. They’re not interested in these people…

But what happens to this narrative if an actual majority of Americans end up voting for Hillary Clinton? Well, there’s always the stolen election narrative…