While new national polls show Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden is holding on to that single-digit lead over President Trump but public opinion surveys prove that more voters think Trump will win the election by a 48%-43% margin.
The survey also suggests that a lot of voters believe there is a silent majority of Trump supporters who keep their preferences to themselves. Out of those questioned in the survey, 55% said they think there are secret voters in their community backing Trump with only 3 in 10 believing there are secret Biden supporters.
“Look, we are not asking this question as some backdoor way to tap into a secret Trump vote that the polls are missing. We have plenty of evidence that there was no measurable secret vote in 2016 or this year either,” said Monmouth University Polling Institute director Patrick Murray. “However, voters’ belief that a secret Trump vote does exist is a very real phenomenon we need to acknowledge. If this expected vote does not materialize on Election Day, some Democrats will be pleasantly surprised and some Republicans will be shocked.”
According to the latest national polls, Biden is ahead of the president by 7.5 points but that closely mirrors the 2016 polls when Hillary Clinton was ahead of Trump by 3.2 points one day before the general election. But Trump came out on top with many of the key battleground states which helped him defeat Clinton in the Electoral College count and win the presidency.
Murray said in a statement, “Of course, most voters believed that Clinton was going to win four years ago and they accepted the different outcome. But the reasons why voters think Trump will win again suggest that some may not accept this year’s result if he loses.”
The poll also indicates that about 60% of voters are optimistic that the November election will be conducted fairly and accurately, but the rest are unsure of how the election will be conducted.
The Monmouth University poll used live telephone operators to question 758 registered voters all across the nation. The survey’s overall sampling error is just 3.6 percentage points.
