As the gap between Obama and McCain widens, far right wingers do not find solace in their guns and Bible any more. Now, they cling to something that has been called
The Bradley Effect . Conservative pundits claim that it will cure a ten point spread. What is this miracle Republican election fixer?
I. The Bradley Effect Was Never More Than a Theory “The very end of myths is to immobilize the world” Roland Barthes Mythologies
The Bradley Effect was a
theory proposed to explain the discrepancy between pre-election polls and exit polls, which showed African-American LA mayor Tom Bradley the winner of the 1982 California governor’s race. The actual post election vote tabulation showed his Republican challenger the winner by 100,000 votes. According to the theory, voters told pollsters that they planned to vote for Bradley, because they wanted to appear hip or open minded, but when they got into the voting booth, their natural American racism took over, and they voted for the white guy instead.
http://www.sacbee.com/812/story/1141286.htmlIn fact, the Republican, George Deukmejian lost on election night, just as the exit polls predicted. It was the absentee voting that put him over the top. An unprecedented number of Republican absentee ballots were cast in that election. The press and Republicans have claimed since then that the presence of a gun initiative on the ballot was responsible for increased Republican turn out. However, whenever there is an unexpected result that favors one party involving one type of voting, someone is going to ask
Was there fraud involved? Absentee voting is one of the easiest types of voting to manipulate. And yet, the press never went there. Instead, they preferred to proclaim that Americans, by nature, were liars, racists and hypocrites.
I do not know who first came up with the idea of the
Bradley Effect Theory but it is clear that George Deukmejian’s campaign helped propel the myth.
http://people.iq.harvard.edu/~dhopkins/wilder13.pdf (Page three) “In the words of the campaign manager for Bradley’s opponent ‘if people are going to vote that way, they certainly are not going to announce it for a survey taker.’”
Why not? Was his candidate named Hitler? Was he running on the Neo-Nazi Party? The Republican Party was perfectly respectable, especially in California during the Reagan era. Most people did not feel the need to apologize for voting GOP. Seems to me like that campaign manager might have been trying to use race as a distraction from other issues---like all those Republican absentee ballots.
A study done several months after Bradley’s loss in 1982 found that only a tiny fraction of the polling/ballot discrepancy was attributable to race.
http://www.marketwatch.com/news/story/obama-run-bradley-effect-polls/story.aspx?guid={79FA00F7-52E8-4054-81F2-E6C14FE7D9F1}&dist=msr_1
And as it turned out, race played only a small portion in Bradley's defeat, if any, DiCamillo said. Field did a white paper dissecting what happened three months after the fact, and discovered that if voters had concealed their true intentions, it might have only affected 1 or 2% of the vote at the most.
If pollsters knew within a couple of days that an unusually high number of Republicans had cast absentee ballots and that was what cost Bradley the election, and if they knew within three months that race had only a minimal (if any) effect upon the contest
why are conservatives swearing up and down that Barack Obama’s current polls mean nothing and that McCain’s final vote tallies will be much higher due to the Bradley Effect ?
II. The Wilder Effect Douglas Wilder was elected Virginia’s governor by a razor thin margin in 1989, after pre-election polls showed him with a wider lead. There was a recount which confirmed his victory. Because he was African-American, the Bradley Effect was cited as the sole cause for the closeness of the race---
even though the Theory had not been proved .
How did the Bradley Effect become dogma? If you have not read
Myth Today the final chapter of
Mythologies by Roland Barthes, here is a link and an excerpt.
http://www.artsci.wustl.edu/~marton/myth.html Myth does not deny things, on the contrary, its function is to talk about them; simply, it purifies them, it makes them innocent, it gives them a natural and eternal justification, it gives them a clarity which is not that of an explanation but that of a statement of fact. If I state the fact of French imperiality without explaining it, I am very near to finding that it is natural and goes without saying: I am reassured. In passing from history to nature, myth acts economically: it abolishes the complexity of human acts, it gives them the simplicity of essences, it does away with all dialectics, with any going back beyond what is immediately visible, it organizes a world which is without contradictions because it is without depth, a world wide open and wallowing in the evident, it establishes a blissful clarity: things appear to mean something by themselves.
The Bradley Effect Theory creates the illusion of truth because it is constructed of tiny little truisms. Of course, some American whites are racist against Blacks. Of course, some racists are embarrassed by this fact. Of course, some people want to hide their flawed nature from strangers (pollsters).
The logical leap comes when we put these three truisms together and say that this explains why Wilder’s win in 1989 was so close when pre-election polls showed him with a comfortable lead.
“Myth transforms history into nature” Barthe
An historical analysis of the Wilder gubernatorial election would focus upon many issues, not just race and the honesty of people responding to pollsters. When media pundits and election specialists seize upon something like the Bradley Effect they are attempting to shut down true historical (or political) analysis. They say, in effect,
The election turned out that way because it had to turn out that way. If a Black man runs against a white in America, he will always lose votes. Why? Because people will change their mind and vote for the white man. That is only natural. Issues such as election fraud and voter suppression are dismissed as irrelevant. Issues peculiar to that one election, like the economy, are ignored.
Once a “universal” law has been cited to explain everything, we are not supposed to question it. We are meant to be relieved that the natural world makes such good sense. Anyone who continues to ask questions is nothing but a crackpot conspiracy theorist, a tinfoil hat lunatic, a hopeless partisan. If an apple falls and lands on the top of your head, you assume that gravity made it fall from a tree. You do not throw in a complication and ask who threw it, right?
However, what if there is no apple tree in the vicinity?
And what if scientific analysis does not confirm the existence of a Bradley Effect? Can you still cite it the next time a Black man challenges a white man in an election?
III. Analysis of the Bradley/Wilder Effect Shows That It Stopped Having Any Effect on American Politics in 1996 http://people.iq.harvard.edu/~dhopkins/wilder13.pdfThe scholarly paper above, titled
No More Wilder Effect, Never a Whitman Effect: When and Why Polls Mislead About Black and Female Candidates by Daniel J. Hopkins analyzes races before and after 1996 and reaches some interesting conclusions. The author finds that while there was a small (2.3% ) gap between polling and performance for Black candidates in the early nineties, candidates such as Wilder, the Governor of Virginia, saw a separate decrease in their performance because of their high name recognition. Basically, people do not care what they tell a pollster, so they are more likely to pick the most familiar name. However, when they go to vote, they spend more time making their decision, and at that point familiarity becomes less important than other qualities. So, the front runner gets increased poll numbers before the election, but the candidate with lower name recognition may gain a few points on election day as people take a good look at him for the first time.
The 2.3% gap between polling and performance for Black candidates which was detectable in the early 1990s disappeared abruptly after 1996. The author speculates that this occurred because of a change in the political climate in the United States. Recall that under Reagan and George Bush Sr. the focus on “crime” and “drugs” and “welfare” was often (deliberately) racially charged. He also points out that in the Democratic primaries this year, Clinton’s polls often outperformed her vote numbers, consistent with a front runner effect.
IV. Do Obama’s Current Poll Numbers Under Predict His Eventual Vote Totals?Here is another link with more info about the primary contests between Clinton and Obama that compares their pre-priamry polling and their votes.
http://www.fivethirtyeight.com/2008/08/persistent-myth-of-bradley-effect.html The Persistent Myth of the Bradley Effect
Many commentators -- the preponderance of them conservative but also some liberals -- take it as an article of faith that the current polling numbers overstate Barack Obama's position because of the so-called Bradley Effect: the notion that some material number of voters will lie about their intentions to pollsters, claiming that they will vote for a black candidate when in fact they will vote for the white guy.
The authors of this article compare the polling/performance data for Clinton and Obama and discover, like the author of the previous paper, that Obama
outperformed rather than underperformed (as one would expect if the Bradley effect was operative) in all parts of the country except the Northeast. These numbers are consistent with the front runner effect----Clinton was well known, and therefore people polled selected her name as the one with which they were most familiar when questioned by pollsters. Based upon these results, the current polls would seem to under predict Obama’s final performance, since, to many Americans he is still largely unknown, while McCain is very well known due to his long career in public office.
V. So If Statistics Say There Has Been No Bradley Effect For Over 10 Years, And At Its Worst It Was Only 2%, Why Do Conservatives Want to Pretend That There Is a Bradley Effect Which Could Cost Obama a 5-10% Lead On Election Day? Do I even need to ask? Obama now leads in many of the polls
beyond the margin of error. The Republicans do not dare steal votes beyond the margin of error, unless they have something to tell the mainstream media pundits to explain why the pre-election polls and exit polls say Obama 55%, McCain 40% and the vote tally says McCain 50%, Obama 49.5%. That
something is going to be
The Bradley Effect .
So, we get William Saffire
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/28/magazine/28wwln-safire-t.html?_r=1&oref=sloginquoting Eugene Robinson saying “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.”
What Saffire does not tell us----the same Washington Post reported a few days later that Clinton won New Hampshire because the pollsters did not anticipate the swarm of feminists who flocked to her to protect their reproductive rights. It was pollster error, not lying voters that caused the problems in that state.
Saffire pretends to be a voice of reason with this line:
“Will There Be an ‘Obama Effect’?” ….Her answer to the question in her headline is one all objective observers can subscribe to: “It is hard to know.”
Everyone wants to be
objective . That is why the oil and gas industry gets away with denying global warming. They pay scientists to write phony papers about how global warming is a natural event, and then the members of the press can hold up the entire body of respectable scientific literaure in one hand and in the other they can hold up a wretched piece of dog crap bought and paid for by industry which says what industry wants it to say, and the members of the press can say (with a straight face) “Hmmm. It is a matter of scientific debate.
It is hard to know which side to believe. I guess we will have to wait for more information to become available before we decide. “
On Conservative sites, they are much more obvious:
http://liberalslie.blogtownhall.com/2008/10/07/could_there_be_a_bradley_effect.thtml I only write this today because yesterday on Special Report on Fox News, Brit Hume brought this up to Juan Williams, an African-American. Juan Williams said it is very possible that the Bradley effect could occur in this election, but would not matter due to Obama's lead in the polls. He predicted that it would only be worth 5% of a difference. But, that 5% could be big in this election, especially considering that Obama does not have a surmountable lead in the polls. Two new polls I posted today by CBS and Zogby, show that the race is actually getting tighter, so it makes me wonder how much if any will the Bradley effect play in the 2008 presidential election.
http://elections.foxnews.com/2008/09/17/sebelius-revives-fears-of-bradley-effect-with-race-comment/ Civil rights author Juan Williams said Obama cannot go into the November election tied with McCain in the polls if he expects to win the presidency.
"Obama's got to have a buffer of 5 to 8 percentage points," Williams said. "So if you have a race in which McCain is at, you know, 41, and Obama's at 41, then imagine that really what you're looking at is McCain at 49, Obama at 41."
http://mvred.com/?p=433 I am of the belief that there is a Bradley Effect, and it will be one of the reasons that Barack Obama loses on November 4th. For those of you who do not know what the Bradley Effect is, here is a simple definition of what many interpret it as: When white voters give inaccurate polling responses for fear that, by stating their true preference, they will appear to the pollster to be racially prejudiced.
A brand new AP/Yahoo.com Poll out says that the race issue could cost Barack Obama up to 6% points this fall. That means come election day, if the polls are within 5 points, it will still be a true toss up.
VI. Statisticians Get Your Calculators Ready...We can debunk the Bradley Effect which some precincts and states are going to try to cite to explain their anomalous vote totals. All we have to do is compare the change in their votes with the change in the votes in other precincts and states with similar demographics but different (i.e verifiable) voting technology.
Remember Warren Mitofsky's truly off the wall Reluctant Responders Theory, in which he tried to explain the exit poll-vote discrepancy in Ohio by claiming that Republicans were predisposed to either avoid or lie to exit pollsters and that was why exit polls showed Kerry winning but the vote total went to Bush? It turned out that his theory only held true for precincts that did not use hand counted paper ballots. Hand counted paper ballots are the riskiest kind with which to commit election tabulation fraud, because the fraud is so easy to detect. So, if you are going to steal votes, you will do it with your e-voting precincts.
Once the locations with the suspicious totals are located, then it is just a matter of doing the recounts and audits and figuring out how the fraud was committed. I think that by election day Obama will be so far ahead that it will not matter what the Republican fraudsters do, but they will try to do it anyway. They can not help themselves. Stealing the vote has gotten to be a habit for them, and this year they feel especially emboldened.
I am looking forward to seeing some Republicans get prosecuted by the federal government for election fraud this time. I hope that it is one of the first priorities of the new Obama/Biden Department of Justice. The old Voting Rights Division has been gagged for too long. It is time that people learned to believe that when they go to the polls to vote their vote will really count.
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