PoliCHARTZ - Thread of U.S. Politics & the Presidential Election

[Final-Fan]

^ I guess the Bradley Effect isn't what I had thought it was from what I read in this thread. The black guy doesn't LOSE points, he just loses the undecided vote (effectively, anyway).

"• The Bradley-Wilder Effect. I have written about this issue here before, but the critical idea is not that some voters "just won't vote for Barack Obama because he's black." Rather, what pollsters fear is that in the context of a survey interview, some respondents may fail to tell the truth about their preferences due to some "social discomfort" arising from Obama's race.

"In the 1980s and early 1990s, in a series of contests between black and white candidates -- including the historic gubernatorial candidacies of Tom Bradley in California in 1982 and Doug Wilder in Virginia in 1989 -- polls typically understated support for the white candidate. The black candidates would receive roughly the same percentage of the vote on Election Day that they did on the last poll, while the white candidates did surprisingly better than the polls predicted. Handicappers started to assume that most of the undecided vote in such contests would "break" for the white candidate.

"Over the last 10 years, according to a paper [PDF] by Harvard post-doctoral fellow Daniel Hopkins that studied 133 statewide races between 1989 and 2006, the apparent polling bias in such races largely disappeared. But can we assume that Bradley-Wilder will remain in remission this fall?"