Ignorance, more than stupidity.

I don't care what polls say what. The general population as a whole is much further to the right than anyone realizes. The issue is that most of those people don't vote, or assume no one agrees with them.

The Leftists always get caught up in this too. They assume that their position is what the majority of the country wants (an extension of Rousseau's "General Will"). Most of the people voting are people who are already politically indoctrinated and motivated.

However, what always happens (both during the Liberal Revolutions of the mid 19th Century, the Interwar period, and the era of Stalinization) the Communists expand the vote wider and wider until it encompasses almost anyone who can breathe. At that point, they typically let their mask slip, and it becomes clear that this next vote is the vote that will usher in full true Socialism.

Then they lose the vote, and in the demographics they were sure they were going to win: the proletariat. Normally they have to either have the Soviet Union step in and remove the government, declare the election illegitimate and declare the dictatorship of the proletariat to be true democracy, or the Liberals end up wining a simple majority and the Communists spaz out, revolt, and get crushed by a Liberal/Industrialst/Miltarist allegiance.

This is because most typical Socialists refuse to understand that Marxism was explicitly proven false during WW1. That was supposed to be the end of Capitalism where the proletariat's false consciousness fell away. But both Lenin and Mussolini tried to explain to the Internationalist Socialists that: the proletariat was the most staunchly reactionary force of all. All other groups were far easier to subvert and control.

The only ones who half got the message were the Fabian Socialists who realized they could hijack Liberalism as a skin suit, pretend that Socialism wasn't Socialism, and then try to literally propagandize everyone into accepting it (and it still rarely works).

In the end, because of Leftist Inevitability Doctrine, the Left thinks that everyone does or will eventually agree with them. In reality, the majority of the population looks much more like this place than it does Reddit. They have no idea just how "far-right" the general population really is. They really want to ignore what the Black National Socialist and Islamists think.