With polls showing Barack Obama with a lead over John McCain both nationally and in battleground states, the conversation over the weekend turned to the reliability of these polls. With an African American running against a White candidate, it appears that the "Bradley Effect" is about to be tested.
The Bradley Effect (we in Virginia like to call it the Wilder Effect) is the supposed discrepancy between election results and the polls when African American candidates run against White candidates. It is claimed that some White voters lie to pollsters about voting for a Black candidate because of social desirability bias - in the voting booth however, they pull the lever for the White candidate. This phenomenon is based on the apparent discrepancy between the polls and the election results in 1982 when the African American mayor of Los Angeles, Tom Bradley, ran against a white candidate for Governor of California. Bradley lost narrowly despite being ahead in the polls.
However, there will be no Bradley Effect on November 4th. If Barack Obama loses the election it will not be because he underperformed the polls because of a hidden racial bias.
Ironically, it will be the smears against Obama that will eliminate any Bradley Effect this year. Throughout this campaign, there has been a whisper campaign against Barack Obama. Last week the smear campaign took center stage when Sarah Palin launched it publicly from the stump. Instead of overtly appealing to racist feelings of some voters - instead of running explicitly against Obama as a Black man - the McCain campaign and their supporters have taken the more palatable approach. They have tried to link Obama to terrorists, they have implied he is Muslim, and they have implied he is Arab. They have tried to scare the voter by making Barack Hussein Obama a scary Arab Muslim Terrorist Man. In their smear campaign, they have been overwhelmingly successful.
The smear campaign has flushed out those voters who may be too uncomfortable to publicly say they won't vote for a Black man, but feel much more comfortable saying they are uneasy about Obama because he may be "foreign". This openness and acceptability of being anti-Muslim or anti-Arab in our post 9/11 world is channeling much of the latent bias that may have contributed to the Bradley Effect. Recent campaign events have fueled the notion that Arabs and Muslims are acceptable bogeymen. In Minnesota last week, John McCain finally stood up to his supporters and pushed back against a woman who claimed Obama was an Arab. He corrected her by saying that Obama was a "citizen", but left on the table the notion that being Arab may be a disqualifier for a candidate. It is telling that in interviews after the rally, the woman who posed the question to McCain still insisted that Obama was an "Arab terrorist."
So, the Bradley Effect may have succumbed this election cycle to the more acceptable form of bias in our society today - that against Muslims and Arabs. This bias is so acceptable that voters are able to be more truthful with pollsters when asked for their voting preference. They are able to rationalize their racist fear of a Black man by accepting that he may be Arab or Muslim. This has contributed to more accurate polling this election cycle. Indeed, in the primaries this year, there was little evidence of the Bradley Effect. Even with the smears against Obama in full effect, or perhaps because of them, most pre-primary polls were fairly accurate. In some cases (for example, the Virginia primary), Obama's election results significantly outperformed the polls because the African American turnout was under-polled.
It is worth noting that even with the McCain campaign in full smear mode last week, the polls showed Obama expanding his lead. The smears, it seems, will have flushed out the Bradley Effect on voting day by moving those who will be moved by these biases early. However, those voting based on racial fears does not appear to be a large enough voting bloc to tip the election in John McCain's favor. The racist vote is already factored into John McCain's polling numbers. This last point may explain why the McCain campaign today shifted tactics away from the smear campaign to a more issues oriented approach.