Gatsby
Joined: 09 Feb 2007
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 Posted: Mon Oct 20, 2008 5:54 am Post subject: NYT: The "Bradley Effect" a myth |
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This is important, and I was afraid it would get lost in another thread.
According to the Bradley Effect, poll numbers would show Obama with more support than he will actually get on election day in the voting booth.
But this writer says he was there when the votes were coming in, and Bradley's loss had nothing to do with a racial bias in polling.
If that is so, the polls are more accurate than some people believed.
However, this is still an unusual race, and it will be difficult to predict actual turnout of various constituencies, including evangelicals, young voters and minorities.
I had been thinking that evangelicals will turn out in greater numbers than the polls suggest. However, not all conservative Christians are deaf, dumb and blind. I suspect some of them may be having their doubts about McCain-Palin about now. If so, the polls could overstate their support, if they are reluctant to admit this to others.
Who knows? But the polls, while they differ in the spread, are consistent in the overall tilt of the election.
We'll see.
Read this:
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October 20, 2008
Op-Ed Contributor
What Bradley Effect?
By BLAIR LEVIN
WITH only two weeks to go before the election, talk has turned to the Bradley effect. The phenomenon is named for Tom Bradley, the African-American mayor of Los Angeles, who lost the 1982 California governor�s race even though exit polls predicted he�d defeat his Republican opponent, George Deukmejian. Some white people, the theory goes, tell pollsters they will vote for black candidates and then, once in the voting booth, don�t.
While it�s no surprise that this has become a topic of discussion as John McCain and Barack Obama near the finish line, as someone who worked for Bradley�s campaign, I think it�s worth pointing out that the effect has been widely misunderstood.
On election night in 1982, with 3,000 supporters celebrating prematurely at a downtown hotel, I was upstairs reviewing early results that suggested Bradley would probably lose.
But he wasn�t losing because of race. He was losing because an unpopular gun control initiative and an aggressive Republican absentee ballot program generated hundreds of thousands of Republican votes no pollster anticipated, giving Mr. Deukmejian a narrow victory....
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http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/20/opinion/20levin.html?ref=opinion |
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