For many Democrats, the only interaction they have with actual Donald Trump supporters is via Facebook, where their long-lost middle school acquaintance cannot stop posting Breitbart articles about Hillary Clinton’s manifold lies. Several recent polls would back this observation as well: surveys show as few as a third of Americans actually back Trump. But the presumptive G.O.P. has a theory as to why the polls underestimate his true strength: his great “silent minority” is staying quiet, he suggested Thursday, out of embarrassment.

While polls show Clinton cruising toward a landslide, Trump has insisted that pollsters have it wrong and that everyone loves him—they just don’t want to admit it. “When I poll, I do fine, but when I run I do much better,” he said during a rally on Thursday. “In other words, people say I’m not going to say who I’m voting for, don’t be embarrassed, I’m not going to say who I’m voting for and then they get it and I do much better, it’s like an amazing effect.”

If Trump’s hypothesis is correct, that phenomenon is technically an effect, documented extensively in political science. The Bradley Effect, named after Tom Bradley, an African-American candidate who served as Los Angeles mayor for 20 years, describes a situation in which polls show that a minority candidate is ahead in an election (like Bradley was), but ultimately underperforms (like Bradley did), because respondents are concerned about appearing bigoted in conversation with the stranger who surveyed them.

Theoretically, Trump would be experiencing a reverse Bradley Effect due to his overwhelming whiteness (orange is the new white). But there may be some anecdotal evidence supporting his claim: before the primaries, pollsters worried that they were underestimating Trump’s support, and Trump ultimately ended up winning enough delegates to secure the nomination. Trump has already inverted political science—why not this, too?