This election will test America's willingness
to vote for an African American president.
And there are at least two relevant questions: will Barack Obama suffer
from a defection of Democrats and Independents who might otherwise have voted
Democratic, but won't support a black candidate? And, secondly, will a Bradley Effect occur,
or is it already occurring, in which the
polls understate John McCain's support against Barack Obama?
A extensive new poll
commissioned by the Associated Press and Yahoo and conducted by Knowledge Networks
shows that Barack Obama could suffer in the final result from white hostility
to his race. Knowledge Networks claims that by getting respondents to fill out
answers on a computer screen (it provides computer access to people who don't
have it), it can get more honest answers to questions about race than it would
have gotten from in-person or phone interviews.
The poll, conducted
from August 27 to September 5, shows Obama in the lead. That shouldn't
be surprising given that most of the polling took place before the climax of
the Republican convention. But the poll still
shows a resistance to Obama among white Democrats that appears to be based on
race. Using questions from the
psychologists' "racial resentments" survey, the poll finds that among white
Democrats, a significant proportion of those who exhibit racial resentment say
they are not voting for Obama.
Overall, 71 percent of white Democrats back Obama. Only fifty-nine percent of white Democrats
who backed Hillary Clinton back Obama. And
here are the racial resentment numbers: Forty-two percent of white Democrats agree with the following
statement: "Italians, Irish, Jews and
other minorities overcame prejudice and worked their way up; blacks should do the same without special
favors." Of these, only 61 percent back
Obama.
Twenty-eight percent of white Democrats agree that "it's
really a matter of some people just not trying hard enough; if blacks would
only try harder, they could just be as well off as whites." Of these, 56 percent
back Obama. Forty percent of white
Democrats disagree that "generations of
slavery have created conditions that make it difficult for blacks to work their
way out of the lower class." Of these,
61 percent support Obama. It's
hard to do the math for these figures, but according to the AP summary, they
suggest that Obama may be currently losing as much as six percentage points in
the polls as a result of prejudiced white voters who might otherwise back a
Democrat.
Nate
Silver is right to questions about these results. As he notes, they don't
screen out unregistered or unlikely voters.
And the racial tilt is probably less than six percent. And what are
described as "the full poll results" don't include figures for "white
Democrats." They are included in the
subsequent AP
stories about the results. So it is
hard to make your own calculations about white Democrats--or independents--and racial resentments.
But it is also hard to know what to make politically of
these figures. One would have to know where these prejudiced voters were
concentrated. One would also have to
know the extent to which the resentment uncovered is going to govern these
voters' final choice. What's interesting from the polls is that more
than half of the people who do score negatively on these tests are backing
Obama. The question is how strongly the
remaining 40 percent or so feel about not backing an African American. Will an Obama campaign that draws a sharp
line between him and McCain on economic issues sway them? As our current editorial
suggests, the Obama campaign would be wise to press these differences.
This controversy about racial resentment is often conflated
with the question about whether a Bradley Effect is taking place. Racial resentment could affect results and
show up in polls. The question is
whether whites or other voters who harbor these resentments tell pollsters that
they are "undecided," but end up voting for McCain; or whether in conducting
polls, pollsters under sample these voters because they are more reluctant to
talk to pollsters. When I was at the Republican
convention, I did hear from one person who claimed to be close to the McCain
campaign that they are counting on the Bradley Effect to pull them past the
finish line in November.
As former TNR intern Daniel Hopkins has shown, the
Bradley Effect has not appeared unequivocally in elections in over a decade.
But there is some controversy about whether it showed up in the Democratic
primaries this year and will therefore appear in the general election.
One Republican website has made a case that McCain will
benefit from the Bradley Effect in November. Sean Oxendine at The Nextright
argues that outside of the deep South, McCain could benefit from a two
percentage point Bradley Effect. He
arrives at this figure by looking at the discrepancy during the Democratic
primaries between estimates of Obama's strength and the final results in
primary states outside the deep South. Nate Silver has disputed Oxendine's
findings. Silver argues that Oxendine did not have grounds to exclude the South
from his calculations. In addition, he says that by using a different
pre-election polling average from the one Oxendine used--pollster.com rather
than realclearpolitics.com--he gets a statistically insignificant result.
I am not going to get into the controversy about polling
averages, and I don't share Silver's insistence that Southern primaries be
included. As my colleague Noam
Scheiber has argued, these primaries may have exhibited a reverse Bradley Effect, due to African American voters who backed Obama saying they were
undecided. Still, my overall position
is closer to Silver. If you look at
Oxendine's results, they are enlarged significantly by ten percentage-plus polling
disparities in New Hampshire and California--two states
in which there were other explanations
for the polling disparities. In New Hampshire, much of
the difference was the result of a last minute pro-Clinton surge that didn't
show up in polls that stopped polling two days before the election. In California,
polls may have undercounted and miscounted Hispanic support for Clinton. So I think the actual spread is closer to one
percent, which is not that statistically significant.
Still, there are states that raise questions about a Bradley Effect. As Hopkins argues, much of the disappearance of
the Bradley Effect can be attributed to the reduction of popular concern in the
late ‘90s about racially-loaded issues like welfare and crime. In the primaries, racial issues only began
to surface significantly after the revelations about Obama's connection to
Pastor Jeremiah Wright. Democratic
voters were talking about Wright in Pennsylvania,
West Virginia, and Kentucky,
all of which exhibit a three percent or higher underestimation of Clinton's support against
Obama. But on the other hand, polls underestimated Obama's support in Indiana by 3.6 percent.
So I am not sure what to conclude, except I have a lingering
suspicion that a Bradley Effect could show up in some of these swing states
where the votes of white ethnic Democrats are going to make the
difference. I think if you were an Obama
supporter, you would want him to be at 50 percent or more in the polls on the
eve of the election. If he is ahead 48
to 47 percent with a lot of undecideds, I would worry. And in that respect, I would see some
connection between the AP-Yahoo findings on racial resentment and the
possibility of a Bradley Effect.
But a final warning: None of this is to argue that race will determine the final result. Even if there is a Democratic defection over
race, and a pronounced Bradley Effect, it could be the case that the Democrats
implicit edge in the election is sufficiently large that Obama will
win. He just won't win by as much.
--John B. Judis