B..b..but…That can’t be right…Maybe we should change the way we poll… 

The Reuters/Ipsos polling team announced Friday that they are dropping the “Neither” option from their presidential preference polls after their tracking polls showed a 17-point swing in favor of the Republican nominee Donald J. Trump, exposing the “Secret Trump Voters” Democrats fear.

“In a presidential campaign notable for its negativity, the option of ‘Neither’ candidate appears to be an appealing alternative, at least to participants in the Reuters/Ipsos opinion poll,” wrote Maurice Tamman, the leader of the Reuters news service’s New York City-based data mining and investigative reporting team. “Many voters on both sides have been ambivalent in their support for Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton and Republican nominee Donald Trump, complicating the task of the pollsters trying to track the race.”

Breitbart News noted the 17-point swing for Trump, which seems to have set off alarm bells at Reuters.

Reuters has a reputation for accurate polling, so it is significant that Mamman made this decision as the presidential campaign enters its last 100 days with both conventions adjourned.

“In the nearly five years Reuters/Ipsos has been offering the ‘Neither/Other’ option to respondents in presidential polling, it has never yielded such a skew,” he wrote. “The results highlight how poll designs and methodologies can yield significantly differing results, and how important differences can emerge from the way a question is framed.”

The real problem this year’s polling presents to Democrats is the reluctance, especially among more educated voters, to confess their support of Trump. Other pollsters have noted the divergence between polls conducted with live operators and robo-phone calls. Live operators have long been considered the preferred, most accurate method inside the polling community. However, live operator polls uniformly show lower support for Trump than online or automatic-dial phone polls.

Much has been made of Trump’s lack of support among college-educated whites, a stronghold of Republican support, but it could very well be that these people, susceptible to social perceptions, have not abandoned the Republican nominee but are giving the socially acceptable answer–until they are alone in the voting booth. Via: Breitbart News