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Edited on Sun Sep-14-08 01:04 PM by EffieBlack
The Bradley Effect (also known as the Wilder Effect) is the phenomenon in which white voters tell pollsters they are going to vote for black candidate but then vote for their white opponent. The result is that the black candidate does worse and the white candidate does better than the polls indicate they would. The Bradley effect is becoming less and less relevant, partly because voters are becoming more enlightened and partly because polling is becoming more sophisticated and corrects for this possibility. But there has still been a concern in this campaign that the Bradley Effect could come into play and shrink Obama's numbers below what they appear to be.
But immediately after McCain selected Palin, we saw a shift as some white voters - mostly women - switched from Obama to McCain. I'm actually encouraged by that for this reason: I think many of the white women who jumped to McCain weren't going to vote for Obama anyway, whether they claimed they planned to or not. Some may have been reluctant to tell a pollster that, but some others might not have realized it themselves and would only have made the jump when actually confronted with the choice in the voting booth. ,
While they certainly don't need any excuse in the privacy of the polling booth to vote against Obama, the Palin selection gave them a "non-racist" choice and a plausible excuse to tell pollsters they planned to vote for someone else. ("I'm voting FOR a woman, not AGAINST a black person") So, instead of waiting until Election Day - when it would be too late - to vote differently than they had previously indicated, these voters tipped their hands.
In so doing, they may have done the Obama campaign a big favor. McCain can no longer depend upon an under-the-radar element that has been the ace-in-the-hole for white candidates for decades. By picking Palin, McCain may have smoked out the people who make the Bradley Effect work against black candidates and given an enormous gift to Barack Obama by making the polls that the Obama campaign uses to determine strategy much more accurate.
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