The belief that there's a hidden racist vote against Obama not reflected in the polls is a constant of this election. It's been variously called the Bradley Effect, the Wilder Effect, the Dinkins Effect, and so on, after black politicians who had large leads in polls against white opponents only to see the leads evaporate on election day. Daniel J. Hopkins, a post-doc fellow at Harvard's Department of Government, examined data from 133 races for governor and senate over nearly two decades and concluded (PDF) there's no evidence it exists in recent elections:
The Wilder effect occupies an unusual position in our thinking about American elections, as it is often invoked but rarely scrutinized. By analyzing Senate and Gubernatorial elections between 1989 and 2006, this paper has provided the first large sample test of the Wilder effect. In the early 1990s, there was a pronounced gap between polling and performance for black candidates of about 2.3 percentage points. But in the mid-1990s, that upward bias in telephone surveys disappeared. At a time when scholars are increasingly concerned about the validity of phone surveys, these results provide some reassurance. We have also seen that the polling-performance gap is closely related to a candidate's level of preelection support, meaning that we should not naively attribute the entire observed gap in a given election to racial bias. Douglas Wilder, David Dinkins, and Tom Bradley were all frontrunners, and so all could have expected a small decline in their election day performance. Even female front-runners should expect declines into election day, although they are not subject to any Wilder-style bias.
1 comments:
What are your beliefs on this topic? Is it possible, that Obama's lead could evaporate on election day because of Bradley-Wilder effect? Or nowadays Americans are significantly less reluctant to vote for an African-American? Vote here - http://www.votetheday.com/americas-20/secret-racism-will-subvert-obamas-advantage-333
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