I guess that in real life they were more open about what they really thought.
And how do you know that? I imagine someone could come to that conclusion by doing something like generalizing from 10 minutes of AM talk radio or direct mail flyers, but kind of thing won't shed any light on the day to day experience of actual conservative people.
And the GP is right. I listened to an Ezra Klein (a progressive) podcast about teen mental health, and the expert noted that phenomena the GP refers to: teen mental health is better for kids from conservative families than kids from liberal families. One of the theories they put out is maybe conservative families put more limits on smartphone/social media use, while liberal families did not and eagerly embraced the new thing, resulting in their kids getting more unmitigated exposure to psychologically damaging technology.