"Do those polls mean Trump's minority outreach is working, despite the chorus of derision? The answer is yes, but not in the two-dimensional/direct way many think."

And make no mistake, the guarded and even sheepish nature of a great deal of Trump's support is real. The experts at the vaunted 538.com have recently noticed that Trump polls much better in surveys taken by computerized "robocalls" and in online surveys compared to his numbers in surveys taken by human pollsters on the phone or in person. 538 says it isn't able to explain why this is, but it's really not a mystery.

The reason is a lot of Trump voters are embarrassed to say they're supporting him in public. They either live in a neighborhood, work in a profession, or belong to an ethnic group where public attacks on "The Donald" are so prominent that his supporters need to think twice about coming out of the Trump closet. This is a reality the depths of which the poll dichotomy is just scratching the surface. That's the audience Trump is really reaching out to in his restructured and refocused campaign. His direct audience at his outreach events is not really the primary focus.

Trump isn't exactly breaking major new ground with this strategy. Ronald Reagan famously visited a devastated neighborhood in the South Bronx in 1980, a place where he wasn't going to get any votes and he was indeed heckled during that campaign visit. But lots of voters saw Reagan looking like he cared about people who weren't going to ever vote for him, and it made it easier for those non-Bronx residents to consider voting for him. Reagan never did get many African American voters in either of his general election presidential campaigns, but he did get a massive share of lower income Democrats and everyone else who liked what they saw that day in 1980 in the Bronx.

Trump also gets another benefit from his outreach and softer tone: he dilutes the 24/7 drumbeat from the Clinton campaign and much of the news media where he's portrayed as a hateful and dangerous maniac. The Clinton campaign is hoping it will be able to at least come close to matching the massive African American turnout that tipped the election for Barack Obama in 2012 and 2008. Clinton could have made an effort to do that by choosing an African American to be her running mate, but instead her campaign is clearly looking to use the fear factor to encourage minority turnout instead.

There's a double trap associated with that strategy. First, negative campaigning can be very effective in helping a candidate win an election but it almost always results in reduced turnout. If Clinton wants African Americans, Millennials, and the other groups who turned out in much higher than traditional numbers for Obama to come out for her this time, negative campaigning probably won't work. Second, all Trump has to do is continue not looking like a dangerous racist to introduce just enough doubt in the fear-mongering Clinton mantra. And that's just what he's done over the last three weeks or so. The polls say it's working.

Once again, the Trump campaign and its messaging have exceeded expectations by going after a new and unexpected target audience. And that audience isn't minority voters or any other block of traditional Democrats. It's the traditional Republicans and right-leaning moderates who never really wanted to vote for Hillary Clinton and are just looking for a way out of an embarrassing predicament. If Trump's campaign schedule and messages continue on this path, they'll get one.