Eugene Robinson
Washington Post
Friday, January 11, 2008; A17
Pollsters and pundits were quick to discount race
and the so-called Bradley effect as factors in Barack Obama 's
narrow loss to Hillary Clinton in the New Hampshire
primary. Given that the same pollsters and pundits (okay, me, too)
were so wrong about the outcome, I think we ought to take a closer
look.
The phenomenon is named after the late Tom Bradley , who in
1982 seemed certain to become the first black governor of California
. Polls showed Bradley, the mayor of Los Angeles, with a
double-digit lead over his white opponent, George Deukmejian. But
Bradley lost.
Subsequently, several high-profile races involving black candidates
followed the same pattern in which apparent leads somehow evaporated
on Election Day. The polls said David Dinkins would beat Rudy
Giuliani by more than 10 points in the 1989 New York
mayoral race; Dinkins ended up winning with 50 percent of the vote
to Giuliani's 48 percent. That same year, the polls gave Douglas
Wilder an 11-point lead over Marshall Coleman in the Virginia
governor's race; Wilder squeaked into office by less than half a
percentage point. In 1990, the polls said Harvey Gantt would handily
defeat incumbent North Carolina senator Jesse Helms; Gantt
lost, and it wasn't even close.
Was it that voters told pollsters they intended to vote for African
American candidates and then, in the privacy of the voting booth,
chose white candidates instead? Not really. In each of these
instances, preelection polls were quite accurate in predicting the
black candidate's vote. What happened was that the polls greatly
underestimated the vote for the white candidates. Unusually large
numbers of self-described undecided voters ended up making the same
decision.
Fast-forward to Tuesday in New Hampshire, and in broad terms that's
what happened to Obama: His vote was roughly as predicted by
election-eve polls, but Clinton's was dramatically bigger than
expected. There are so many caveats, however, that it's impossible
to diagnose the Bradley effect with any confidence.
For one thing, the phenomenon has been absent in other recent
high-profile races in which black and white candidates competed. In
Harold Ford's unsuccessful 2006 bid for a U.S. Senate seat
from Tennessee , for example, most of the polls actually
underestimated his vote -- and overestimated the vote for Ford's
white opponent, Bob Corker , who won by just three percentage
points. Ford was hurt by a racist television ad, to be sure, but my
point is that at least the polls were close to the mark.
The Pew Research Center looked at this and other recent black-white
statewide contests and concluded that "fewer people are making
judgments about candidates based solely, or even mostly, on race
itself."
The other big caveat is the evidence that gender, not race, was
probably the most important facet of identity Tuesday. Clinton,
obviously, is the first woman to have a realistic chance of being
elected president. Women voted in unusually large numbers -- they
outnumbered men at the polling places 57 to 43 percent -- and they
went heavily for Clinton over Obama.
Clinton's much-covered display of emotion may have been the turning
point, but I'm not sure it was more decisive than her extensive
grass-roots organization or her energetic get-out-the-vote
operation.
Still, there are a couple of anomalies. The exit poll done for the
television networks indicated that nearly four out of 10 Democratic
voters made their decisions in the three days before the primary.
But the exit poll also indicated that those last-minute deciders
broke equally for Clinton and Obama -- which pretty clearly was not
the case.
Well into the evening, even the Clinton campaign expected Obama to
win. Opinion polling isn't an exact science, but it's extremely rare
for so many experienced pollsters to be so wrong. When you try to
think of precedents, you keep coming back to races such as, well,
Tom Bradley's and Doug Wilder's.
There are many reasons why New Hampshire voters might choose Clinton
over Obama, or Obama over Clinton, or John Edwards over either of
them. What happened in New Hampshire was weird, but it's not
possible to conclude that racism played any role in Clinton's big
upset. The dynamic of two potential "firsts" -- first female
president, first black president -- means that history may be an
unreliable guide. These are, indeed, uncharted waters.
We'll have plenty of chances in the coming weeks to measure
preelection polls against actual results -- including in states with
much more racial diversity than New Hampshire. But after Tuesday's
big surprise, embarrassed pollsters and pundits had better be
vigilant for signs that the Bradley effect, unseen in recent years,
has crept back.
eugenerobinson@washpost.com |