THE DAILY BLADE: Bradley Effect Bogus?
This is interesting: Sal Russo and Blair Levin each discuss “the Bradley Effect” in the 1982 race for CA governor between Attorney General George Deukmejian (R), and LA Mayor Tom Bradley (D) – the former’s consulting firm worked for Deukmejian’s campaign, the latter worked on Bradley’s – and both come to the same conclusion.
In The Wall Street Journal, Russo writes:
Over the past generation, every time a black liberal candidate runs for public office, pundits are quick to assert that the so-called Bradley Effect will rear its ugly head and deny justice in America for another African-American. …
It's a comforting narrative for liberals. But it defies the reality of the campaign that gave birth to it. In 1982, California's Republican Attorney General George Deukmejian was trailing badly in the campaign for governor against African-American Democrat Tom Bradley, the popular mayor of Los Angeles. But he won the election by 93,345 votes out of nearly eight million cast.
Public pollsters and others were stunned; they'd already proclaimed Bradley the victor and turned their attention to the U.S. Senate race between Republican San Diego Mayor Pete Wilson and Democratic Gov. Jerry Brown. Pollsters also predicted a Jerry Brown victory. Mr. Wilson won handily.
The explanation for both Republican wins was simple. Voters rejected two liberal candidates. …
Mr. Bradley was defeated because he was too liberal, not too black.
Levin makes this argument in The New York Times:
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.
In fact, there may even be a “reverse” Bradley Effect, if you can call it that. Politico’s Ben Smith recently reported on the intriguing findings of University of Washington psychologist Anthony Greenwald and political scientist Bethany Albertson, who analyzed data from the 32 states holding Democratic primaries. Their findings:
[T]hey found a reverse Bradley effect in 12 primary states. In these states they found actual support for Obama exceeded pre-election polls by totals of 7 percent or more, well beyond the polls’ margins of error. These errors ranged up to 18 percent in Georgia.
“The Bradley effect has mutated. We are seeing it in several states, but the reverse effect is much stronger,” said Greenwald. …
“Blacks understated their support for Obama and, even more surprising, whites did too. There also is some indication that this happened in such Republican states as Montana, South Dakota, Oklahoma, Missouri and Indiana,” Greenwald said. …
Albertson noted that the polls have systematically underestimated Obama’s support and this can have an impact on the election.
“This distortion is interesting because poll numbers are part of the story journalists tell the public and they can also affect campaign strategy, such as states in which to spend resources,” she said.
In another article, Smith writes about Obama’s below-the-radar campaign to register enough new black voters to zero out or exceed the six percent of whites who will not vote for a black man:
Early statistics provide tentative support to the notion of a black voter surge disproportionate even to the massive turnout expected across the board in November.
In Georgia, for instance, the percentage of registered voters who are black has increased almost two points since 2004, to 29 percent, according to the Secretary of State's office. And, with early voting underway in the state, African-Americans are participating at vastly disproportionate numbers, casting nearly 40 percent of the early ballots, according to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. …
In North Carolina, for instance, 30 percent of a record-breaking surge of new voters announced recently were African-American voters; blacks make up just 22 percent of the state's population. In Virginia, registration isn't measured by race, but new registrants were concentrated in heavily African-American and Democratic counties, like the city of Richmond.
Early voting data from eight states – including OH, IA and GA – bears this out. Dems are voting in greater numbers than Repubs, and blacks are voting in greater numbers than they did in 2004. However, Curtis Gans, director of the Committee for the Study of the American Electorate at American University, tells USA Today that there is still time for Repubs to close the gap, which he attributes to Obama's get-out-the-vote effort.
Writing in The New York Times, Michael A. Cohen, senior research fellow at the New America Foundation, thinks the black vote “
By some estimates an 8 percent jump in black turnout in Nevada, over 2004, would win him the state; in Florida, a 23 percent improvement could make the difference. In Ohio in 2004, George Bush won 16 percent of African-American voters; this year if Mr. Obama wins 95 percent of the black vote, he will not need a single additional voter over what John Kerry received in 2004.
In states like Michigan, Pennsylvania and Ohio the key for Democratic victory has generally been strong African-American turnout. So even in these three states if Mr. Obama loses some white voters because of his skin color he may cancel that out with support from non-white voters. And lest we forget, John Kerry and Al Gore both won Michigan and Pennsylvania while barely losing in Ohio.
The New York Times also explores the question of whether the Bradley Effect is “a theory in search of data”:
In a new study, Daniel J. Hopkins, a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard, considered 133 elections between 1989 and 2006 and found that blacks running for office before 1996 suffered a median Bradley effect of 3 percentage points. Blacks running after 1996, however, performed about 3 percentage points better than their polls predicted. Mr. Hopkins argues that the changes in the welfare laws in 1996 and the decline of violent crime took off the table issues that had aggravated racial animosity.
The Bradley effect in the 2006 vote was largely absent (and in some stances a reverse effect was seen by some pollsters). In Tennessee, Harold Ford Jr., a black congressman, lost by six points. His pollster, Pete Brodnitz, said the campaign had been watching for a Bradley effect and screened carefully to make sure its own polls looked only at the people most likely to vote. Internal polls were largely correct, but some public polls, relying on a more general population, were wildly off. Mr. Brodnitz blamed bad polling, not lying.
While acknowledging that “no pollster can look into the soul of a voter,” Cohen concludes that, “examining what we do know about voting patterns suggests that fears of racial animus determining the presidential election are wildly overstated. Race may play a factor on Election Day; but then again it may not. And even if it does, it may provide more, not less benefit to Barack Obama.”
For his part, Levin pleads: ‘[W]e should free Tom Bradley’s name from an association he would have abhorred. … He was the opposite of the “Us vs. Them” politics so often cited as demonstrating the Bradley effect.”
pH For America Obama Ad Hits A Raw Nerve At The New York Times
An evangelical friend from Texas forwarded an email that she had received from her friends; it counsels her to watch this video “showing” Barack Obama mocking the Bible and insulting Christians. Watch the video and you can imagine that if you were an evangelical, you would be enraged at Obama as well.
Yet look up Obama’s full speech, which this video was based on, and you see it’s not mocking at all. On the contrary, it’s a very thoughtful examination of the role of faith in public life, insulting to no one. …
Look at the video and then look at the speech, and it’s clear that this isn’t just someone’s anti-Obama spin. It’s fraud, a deceptive clip job, a lie to make evangelicals worried about Obama. The aim is to “otherize” him …
You’ll recall that Obama was threatened enough by this video to denounce Marks as a “scam artist” on his “Fight the Smears” Web site.
In an article about the launch of his 527 and the planned ad, Marks himself quotes the text from Obama’s June 28, 2006 keynote address at the “Building a Covenant for a New America” conference held by liberal group Call to Renewal so people can judge for themselves whether the video accurately "shows" (Kristof's scare quotes, not The Stiletto's) his words without any editing or splicing sleight of hand:
Which passages of Scripture should guide our public policy? Should we go with Leviticus, which suggests slavery is ok and that eating shellfish is abomination? How about Deuteronomy, which suggests stoning your child if he strays from the faith? Or should we just stick to the Sermon on the Mount - a passage that is so radical that it's doubtful that our own Defense Department would survive its application? So before we get carried away, let's read our bibles. Folks haven't been reading their bibles.
For some reason, Kristof chose not to quote this particular section from Obama’s speech in his article and instead quoted a different section. So if Marks’ sin is that he selectively quoted from Obama’s speech, then Kristof is a sinner, too. Which means his article is as “deceptive” as Marks’ ad.
BTW: Contrary to Kristof’s assertion, The Heel - an Ivy-educated attorney with a prestigious New York firm and occasional contributor to this blog – finds Obama’s equating Jewish dietary laws with slavery offensive.
Editorial Note: The Bradley Effect post was updated to include specific information on early voting trends.
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