As Joe Biden’s lead in the polls continues to expand both nationally and in battleground states, a new explanation for his surge is taking hold, especially among President Trump’s staunchest supporters. The theory holds that there is a large reserve army of secret Trump voters who are afraid, in this time of cancel culture, to state their preference, and that’s why the polls are so lopsided.

The theory is partly a hangover from 2016. It’s true that pollsters undercounted Trump voters in that election. But it’s a huge jump to think it was because SMAGA (Secret Make America Great Again) voters were refusing to state their preference. A postmortem by the polling industry went looking for significant numbers of SMAGAs and came up empty.

There were real polling failures in 2016, particularly at the state level, but the polls weren’t that wrong. An average of the final national polls indicated a Hillary Clinton victory margin of 3.3 percent. She won the popular vote by 2.1 percent — well within the margin of error. Pollsters called 47 out of 50 states correctly, and they weren’t that far off in the ones they got wrong. Remember, Trump won thanks to 80,000 votes in three states.

Perhaps the biggest mistakes pollsters made — or at least the ones most responsible for failing to predict Trump’s narrow Electoral College win — were undercounting less-educated voters and failing to catch a late shift among undecideds toward Trump. In key battleground states, late deciders went heavily for Trump.

Sure, some undecideds could be considered “secret” voters, but only if they were lying about being undecided, and there’s little evidence of that.

Worse for the SMAGA thesis: There are a lot fewer undecided voters in 2020 than there were in 2016, and undecided voters typically break against the incumbent. In 2016, one driver of high levels of voter indecision was that both candidates were intensely disliked. Those voters broke decisively for Trump. Right now, Biden leads heavily among voters who dislike both candidates.

So why the sudden re-emergence of the SMAGA talking point? The most obvious answer is fear. Biden supporters are terrified we’ll see 2016 all over again. And with increasingly grim polling news, the Trump campaign doesn’t have much of an alternative to declaring the polls fake and betting it all on the turnout of a silent majority.

Some peddlers of the silent-Trumper theory cite a recent survey from the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank, which found that 62 percent of Americans “say the political climate these days prevents them from saying things they believe because others might find them offensive.” Conservatives and centrist liberals — the theoretical feedstock of the SMAGA reserve army — were the most likely to say they self-censor.

It’s a disturbing finding, but it’s a heavy lift to infer direct relevance for polling, unless you want to believe the president is actually doing well.

Maybe, for the president and his allies, believing in a mythical league of frightened Trumpers is better than facing reality.

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