A large percentage of college graduates are hiding their support for Donald Trump, according to test surveys of 309 college graduates conducted by Morning Consult.
That hidden support for Trump could be providing Hillary Clinton a false, 2-point advantage in election polls, according to the polling firm’s results.
The public’s practice of hiding support for Trump comes as the Internet’s expansion helps progressives identify and penalize the professionals and other white-collar Americans who privately champion conservative policies and ideas. Even high-status professionals, such as software designer Brendan Eich, have been exposed, outed and professionally harmed in his Internet-enabled era of “fishbowl politics” after angering peers who are progressives.
The Morning Consult survey used two tests. One test quizzed 1,249 people in a phone interview, another test quizzed 825 people online via a computer. The combined survey reached 309 college graduates and 388 people with incomes above $50,000.
Among the college graduates reached for the person-to-personal test, only 39 percent told pollsters they backed Trump. But Trump got 46 percent support from college graduates who participated in the online test.
That means the two tests of 309 college graduates showed a 14-point switch from Clinton and Trump, so reducing an apparent 21-point support gap down to a seven-point support gap.
This huge shift was repeated among the overlapping group of 388 voters who earn more than $50,000 per year. This group showed a 11-point shift away from Clinton and towards Trump. According to Morning Consult,
On the phone, Trump trails Clinton by 10 points, 54 percent to 44 percent, among voters in households which earn more than $50,000. But in online surveys, Trump leads Clinton by 1 point, 50 percent to 49 percent, among those voters.
This hidden support for Trump won’t have a huge impact on national polls, says Morning Consult, because the 7 percent slice of college graduates only comprise 1 percent of the the nation’s electorate. That two-point shift is “not statistically significant,” says the polling firm, which describes the threatened and intimidated Trump supporters with a condescending term, “shy Trumpers.”
The survey was done with Politico, which also dismissed the results, even though Politico acknowledged a real-world difference in average results from in-person polls and automatic polls. According to Politico, there is “an emerging disparity in the public polling: Hillary Clinton leads Trump by 4 percentage points in national, live-interview phone polls, according to HuffPost Pollster’s average as of Wednesday night — but only by 2.6 points in online and automated phone polls.”
The evidence of ‘fishbowl politics’ in national elections follows a long series of news stories about academics and other professionals being fired, stigmatized or punished for conserving “classical liberal” ideas about individual rights and free speech, amid progressive demands for imposed diversity, group rights and “politically correct” stigmatization of classical American ideas.
Unlike companies, which use advertising, low prices and new products to win sales in a dog-eat-dog free market, professionals rely on friendships with other professionals to win contracts, clients and status. That makes professionals very vulnerable to threats and punishments from even a minority of their peers.
Business executives at companies tend to downplay political disagreements because they tend to measure their personal success via the non-political measure of their company’s collective profit-and-loss. But outside the dog-eat-dog of marketplace competition, some professionals choose to measure their success by advancing a progressive claim, especially if they have a very personal connection to the progressive claim.
These fishbowl politics seem to be particularly prominent for people in government-funded universities. For example, a tenured professor at New York University was recently forced out out his job by his peers for challenging progressive hegemony at the university. According to the New York Post:
An NYU professor crusading against political correctness and student coddling was booted from the classroom last week after his colleagues complained about his “incivility,” The Post has learned.
Liberal studies prof Michael Rectenwald, 57, said he was forced Wednesday to go on paid leave for the rest of the semester.
“They are actually pushing me out the door for having a different perspective,” the academic told The Post.
Rectenwald launched an undercover Twitter accountcalled Deplorable NYU Prof on Sept. 12 to argue against campus trends like “safe spaces,” “trigger warnings” policing Halloween costumes and other aspects of academia’s growing PC culture.
He chose to be anonymous, he explained in one of his first tweets, because he was afraid “the PC Gestapo would ruin me” if he put his name behind his conservative ideas on the famously liberal campus.
The pressure is also imposed in the workplace by individual progressives, especially university-educated women, according to a new survey by Pew. According to the survey:
nearly six-in-ten registered voters who back Clinton (58%) say they have a “hard time” respecting someone who supports Trump for president; 40% say they have “no trouble” with it. Nearly the opposite is true among Trump supporters, with 56% saying they have no trouble respecting someone who backs Clinton and 40% saying they do have trouble with it.
The poll showed that 68 percent of Clinton’s white female supporters, and 66 percent of college graduates who support Clinton, have a “hard time” respecting Trump’s conservative supporters.
The progressive pressure is being amped up by progressive leaders, including Clinton, who declared Sept. 9 that:
You know, to just be grossly generalistic, you could put half of Trump’s supporters into what I call the basket of deplorables. Right? The racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic — you name it. And unfortunately there are people like that. And he has lifted them up … some of those folks, they are irredeemable, but thankfully they are not America.
In contrast, conservative voters are far more comfortable when dealing with Clinton supporters, according to the Pew survey.
Other pollsters also report evidence that Trump supporters hide from pollsters.
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