"There are many people who are voting for Trump who are in environments where it’s politically untenable to admit it because he’s become so toxic."

"But I’m still not convinced that not telling your business associate or the people in your Rotary Club or the people in your country club is the same thing as not telling a pollster," said Whit Ayres, a Republican pollster, quoted in "'Hidden' Trump Voters Exist. But How Much Impact Will They Have?/Republicans insist that millions of Americans want to vote for Trump but won’t admit it. Polling experts tell a different story" (NYT)

“The idea that people lie, it’s an interesting theory, and it’s not like it’s completely off-the-wall,” said David Winston, a pollster who works with congressional Republicans. “But it’s obviously a very complicated thing to try to prove because what do you do? Ask them, ‘Are you lying?’”...

If voters were indeed afraid of voicing their support for the president, Mr. Winston said [there would be] an uptick in the percentage of undecided voters rather than a rise in support for Mr. Biden....

While the effects of a hidden Trump vote are certainly overstated by the president’s allies, that does not mean that no evidence exists that polls are missing some of his voters. A small percentage of his support is probably being undercounted, and has been in the past, public opinion experts said. And in states like North Carolina, where the margin of victory could be narrow, the undercount could make a difference between a poll being right or wrong.

[Neil Newhouse, a Republican who led Mitt Romney’s polling in 2012, said that in 2016] Mr. Trump tended to score 2 or 3 points higher in phone surveys when respondents were asked to press a button to record their preferences rather than talk to a live person. In postelection polling, when he asked people if they had ever been unwilling to talk about their vote, 35 percent of Trump voters said yes. And they tended to be women from Democratic-leaning counties.

Mr. Newhouse has picked up further evidence of such reluctance recently. In polls he conducted late last month in North Carolina and Iowa, he found that one-quarter to one-third of voters answered “yes” when asked if they knew someone who is voting for Mr. Trump but would not say so to anyone but their closest friends.

“This totally confirms the notion of ‘shy Trump voters,’” Mr. Newhouse said. But, he added, if polls are undercounting some Trump voters — a group that tends to be uniquely expressive and adamant about their support for the president — no one can say by how much....

I question that last parenthetical — Trump voters are "a group that tends to be uniquely expressive and adamant about their support for the president." That's denying the issue the polling experts were talking about! Some Trump voters are vocal, and among the vocal Trump supporters there's a tendency to be expressive. But the point is that there are other people — who knows how many? — who believe there are social and economic consequences to being seen as a Trump supporter. That's a different group, and it's a group defined by its tendency not to be expressive about supporting Trump.

Why was that parenthetical thrown in? I think it's because the NYT wants to give its readers the comfort of thinking Trump is on a losing path. The article seems to have been written with the idea of debunking the notion that there's a big hidden Trump vote. Just tell the story straight!