Eliza Collins

USA TODAY

Donald Trump’s campaign manager says that current polling does not accurately reflect the number of people who will vote for the Republican nominee. Her reasoning? “The undercover Trump voter.”

In an interview with the United Kingdom’s Channel 4 News, Kellyanne Conway was asked about Trump’s struggling poll numbers. Trump is behind Clinton in every national poll and most battleground polls that have been released in recent weeks.

“The polling numbers for Donald Trump are looking pretty bad, aren’t they at the moment?” the Channel 4 reporter asked Conway, according to a video clip posted on Mediaite.

“No, just the cherry-picked polling numbers that are put out there by media outlets that are also bent on his destruction,” said Conway, who is a conservative pollster and owns a polling company.

Of note, polls posted by USA TODAY and other media outlets must pass certain methodology requirements to be covered.

“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 said. “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.”

Conway said “the hidden Trump vote” in the United States was significant and said the campaign had done an internal project to determine what it was.

“I can’t discuss it,” she said. “It’s a project we’re doing internally. I call it the undercover Trump voter, but it’s real.”

Conway is not the first campaign operative to criticize polls that show a candidate behind. Supporters of 2012 Republican nominee Mitt Romney complained that polls were weighted unfairly against him. He lost to President Obama by 4 percentage points that November.