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Will the 'Bradley effect' kick in?
Viewpoint
Wednesday August 20th 2008
If in the past white voters have told pollsters that they were happier about voting for black candidates than they really were, where does this leave Barack Obama? Gary Younge reports
Wednesday August 20th 2008
Obama surrounded by enthusiastic would-be voters in Berlin. Photograph: Jim Young/Reuters
As anyone watching John Edwards’s coiffed halo being slung in the gutter will tell you, politicians are wont to lie about things that it is not in their interests to tell the truth about. That is only natural. Nonetheless, the deceit throws us off. We thought we were looking at one thing: honest John, with his ailing wife, campaigning in a joint political venture. Suddenly we are confronted with another: one more narcissistic male politician who craves the spotlight and yet remains unaware that people are watching his every move.
It is precisely because politics is made up of human beings that it is unpredictable, and that there are pundits, pollsters and columnists trying to bring order to the chaos by claiming they know things they don’t. This year is more chaotic than most. But the problem is not so much the politicians as the voters.
Nobody has seen a year like this before. A black candidate with a base of first-time and unlikely voters is running against a military veteran in a time of war, against deepening recession and waning global influence. For the first time in decades, neither candidate is an incumbent or a vice-president. There are a lot of indications from a variety of sources that this will be a close election, Michael Traugott, a University of Michigan professor of communications, said recently. And the margins will be very close in many places.
During the last election nine states – New Mexico, Nevada, Minnesota, Iowa, Wisconsin, Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, New Hampshire – delivered results that were within the margin of error. This time around pollster.com has only one of those, Nevada, as a toss-up. The other eight it believes will be close are Colorado, Virginia, Indiana, Montana, North Dakota, Florida, Missouri and Alaska. Nobody knows how this is going to shake out. For all the money and metrics devoted to predicting this campaign, the polls are likely to be off because some white people will lie, some black people and young people won’t show up to vote and some of the young, black, poor and Hispanic will not even be polled.
In the past, white voters have told pollsters that they were happier about voting for black candidates than they really were, leaving the vote for black candidates about five points less than predicted. This was once known as the Bradley effect, after the 1982 gubernatorial candidacy of black Democratic candidate Tom Bradley in California. Bradley was ahead in the polls until the very end, but lost. Seven years later it was renamed the Wilder effect, after Douglas Wilder narrowly scraped to victory as Virginia governor in what, according to polls, ought to have been a comfortable win.
Whether there will be an Obama effect remains to be seen. A Rasmussen poll last month showed that 85% of likely voters said that they were willing to vote for a black candidate. But only 64% thought their family, friends and co-workers would. The difference is the margin of error between how broad-minded people want to appear and how broad-minded they are. A report by the Pew Research Centre, which matched the polls to the results for five black candidates during the 2006 midterms, found that they were highly accurate. The reality is we won’t know until election day.
The people who might vote for Obama are just as unpredictable. The headline figure for most polls is likely voters. African Americans and the young form a crucial part of Obama’s base, making his candidacy viable in states like Virginia and competitive in places like Ohio. The trouble is they are unlikely voters with a low turnout rate. But the symbolic nature of Obama’s candidacy might spark a greater commitment.
Take Virginia. This state, which the Democrats have not carried for more than four decades, has 235,976 more registered voters than it did in 2004, when President Bush won it by 262,000 votes. Around half came from an area of the state that is now leaning more Democratic. Of the 202,000 who have registered this year almost two-thirds are under 35. But the extent to which that translates into votes has yet to be seen. You don’t win elections by registering voters but by turning them out. Virginia’s electoral rolls increased by more than a million between 1996 and 2004, and the Republican majority there increased too.
There are those who are not polled at all. Roughly 14% of the adult population relies solely on cell phones, with the young, black, Latino and unreligious disproportionately represented. But pollsters call landlines, out of habit and because it’s cheaper. A huge section of potential Obama supporters aren’t being asked what they think.
It could be that white self-deception and black enthusiasm will cancel each other out. It could be that the old models no longer apply. It could be a one-off or a paradigm shift. In all likelihood it will play out very differently in different places. Like John Edward’s affair, we won’t know until it’s over. And by then it will be too late.
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