As we all play armchair pundits and try to predict who will win, and by how much, we might as well acknowledge the biggest elephant in the room:
PhysOrg.com - Polls may underestimate Obama's support by 3 to 4 percent, researchers sayCurrent polls of the presidential election
may be underestimating Barack Obama's support by 3 to 4 percent nationally and
possibly larger margins in the Southeast and some strongly Republican states, according to
University of Washington researchers.
[Note: Since so many political pundits hail from the East Coast or Midwest, it's good to see the Pacific Northwest represented in these discussions for once.]Psychologist Anthony Greenwald and political scientist Bethany Albertson, who
analyzed data from the 32 states holding Democratic primaries, said
race played an unexpectedly powerful role in distorting pre-election poll findings and
the same scenario could play out in the election between Obama and John McCain.
"The Clinton-Obama raced dragged on so long, but
it generated a lot of data. It is the only existing basis on which to predict how a black candidate will do in a national general election," said Greenwald, who pioneered studies how people's unconscious bias affects their behavior. "
The level of inaccuracy of the polls in the primaries was unprecedented."
Prior to the start of the primary season, the UW researchers thought
the so-called Bradley effect would play a key role in the 2008 election. Previously,
this effect showed exaggerated pre-election poll support for black candidates in some prominent elections in the 1980s and 1990s.
The Bradley effect is named for former Los Angeles mayor Tom Bradley, a black, who lost a close 1982 gubernatorial election in California
after holding a solid lead in the polls. As the 2008 primaries played out, Greenwald and Albertson found that
the Bradley effect only showed up in three states -- California, New Hampshire and Rhode Island.
[Note: Obama currently leads by double digits in all three of these states.]However,
they found a reverse Bradley effect in 12 primary states. In these states they found
actual support for Obama exceeded pre-election polls by totals of 7 percent or more, well beyond the polls' margins of error. These errors ranged
up to 18 percent in Georgia.
"
The Bradley effect has mutated. We are seeing it in several states, but
the reverse effect is much stronger," said Greenwald. "
We didn't have a chance to look at these effects before on a national level. The prolonged Democratic primary process this year
gave us a chance to look for this effect in 32 primaries in which the same two candidates faced each other."
Albertson and Greenwald believe the
errors in the polls are being driven by social pressures that can operate
when voters are contacted by telephone prior to an election. They said that
polls from states in the Southeast predicted a large black vote for Obama and
a much weaker white vote. They found that,
in a few Southeast states, exit polls showed that
both whites and blacks gave more votes to Obama than the pre-election polls had predicted.
"
Blacks understated their support for Obama and, even more surprising,
whites did too. There also is some indication that
this happened in such Republican states as Montana, South Dakota, Oklahoma, Missouri and Indiana," Greenwald said.
"If you call people on the phone today and ask who they will vote for,
some will give responses influenced by what may be understood, locally, as the more desirable response. It is easy to suppose that these people are lying to pollsters. I don't believe that. What I think is
they may be undecided and experiencing social pressure which could
increase their likelihood of naming the white candidate if their region or state has a history of white dominance. They also might
give the name of the Republican if the state is strongly Republican."
A good analogy of a desirable response and social pressure, he said, would be if you lived in Detroit and you get a call asking if you will participate in an anonymous survey about automobiles.
"You agree and are asked if you prefer American or foreign cars. Even if you own a Japanese car,
you might experience some pressure to give an answer that might be more appreciated by the caller -- that you prefer American cars," said Greenwald. "When it comes to politics, although voters are presumably anonymous when speaking to pollsters,
the fact that the person calling them knows their phone number may not let them feel anonymous."
Albertson noted that
the polls have systematically underestimated Obama's support and
this can have an impact on the election.
"This distortion is interesting because
poll numbers are part of the story journalists tell the public and
they can also affect campaign strategy, such as states in which to spend resources," she said.
The New York Times - Do Polls Lie About Race?Three weeks to Election Day and
polls project a victory, possibly a big one, for Barack Obama.
Yet everywhere,
anxious Democrats wring their hands. They’ve seen this Lucy-and-the-football routine before, and
they’re just waiting for their ball to be snatched away, the foiled Charlie Browns again.
Remember how the exit polls in 2004 predicted President Kerry?The anxiety is more acute this year, because Senator Obama is the first African-American major-party presidential nominee. And even pollsters say
they can’t be sure how accurately polls capture people’s feelings about race, or
how forthcoming Americans are in talking about a black candidate.
In recent days,
nervous Obama supporters have traded worry about a survey — widely disputed by pollsters yet voraciously consumed by the politically obsessed — that concluded
racial bias would cost Mr. Obama six percentage points in the final outcome. He is, of course, about
six points ahead in current polls. See? He’s going to lose.
[Note: As of this posting, Real Clear Politics' average of polls places Obama between seven and eight points ahead nationally.]If he does,
it wouldn’t be the first time that polls have overstated support for an African-American candidate. Since 1982, people have talked about
the Bradley effect, where even last-minute polls predict a wide margin of victory, yet the black candidate goes on to lose, or win in a squeaker. (In the case that lent the phenomenon its name, Tom Bradley, the mayor of Los Angeles, lost his race for governor,
the assumption being that voters lied to pollsters about their support for an African-American.)
But pollsters and political scientists say concern about a Bradley effect — some call it a Wilder effect or a Dinkins effect, and
plenty call it a theory in search of data — is misplaced. It obscures what they argue is the more important point:
there are plenty of ways that race complicates polling. Considered alone or in combination,
these factors could produce an unforeseen Obama landslide with surprise victories in the South, a stunningly large Obama loss, or a recount-thin margin.
In a year that has already turned expectations upside down, it is hard to completely reassure the fretters.
Among the non-Bradley factors at the intersection of race and polling is something called
the reverse Bradley (perhaps more prevalent than the Bradley), in which polls understate support for a black candidate, particularly in regions where it is socially acceptable to express distrust of blacks. Then there are
the voters not captured by polls. Research shows that
those who refuse to participate in surveys tend to be less likely to vote for a black candidate. The race of the questioner, too, affects a poll — but no one is sure whether people give more or less accurate answers when they’re interviewed by someone of their own race.
“
How much we are under-representing people who are intolerant and therefore unlikely to vote for Obama is an open question,” said Andrew Kohut, the president of Pew Research Center. “I suspect not a great deal, but maybe some.
And ‘maybe some’ could be crucial in a tight election.”
In 1982, exit polls had Mayor Bradley
so likely to win that newspaper headlines called him the victor. Yet he lost, narrowly. There emerged what seemed like a pattern: a number of polls found more support than there actually was for Harold Washington in the 1983 Chicago mayoral race; for David N. Dinkins in the 1989 New York mayoral race; and for L. Douglas Wilder in the 1989 Virginia governor’s race.
Were people so afraid to appear bigoted that they lied to pollsters, thinking it more socially acceptable to support a black candidate? Pollsters and political scientists have long questioned that assumption because
they do not believe people have an incentive to deceive unless they are explicitly asked, “Do you support the white guy or the black guy?”“
We have no evidence that people lie to us,” said Joe Lenski, executive vice president of Edison Media Research, which conducts the exit polls the television networks use. He and others say that
discrepancy in the polls has more to do with which people decline to participate, or say they are undecided.
Adam Berinsky, a political scientist at M.I.T. who has written about the “I don’t know” voters, points out that
while polls overpredicted Mr. Dinkins’s support in 1989, they got it right in 1993, when he was running against the same opponent, Rudolph Giuliani. In 1989, Mr. Berinsky argues,
people who feared being thought racist said “I don’t know.” By 1993, they could find things in Mr. Dinkins’s mayoral record to object to and so
felt more free to express their opposition without fear of seeming racist.
Mr. Kohut conducted a study in 1997 looking at differences between people who readily agreed to be polled and those who agreed only after one or more callbacks.
Reluctant participants were significantly more likely to have negative attitudes toward blacks — 15 percent said they had a “very favorable” attitude toward them, as opposed to 24 percent of the ready respondents. “
The kinds of people suspicious of surveys are also more intolerant,” Mr. Kohut said.
Scott Keeter, Pew’s director of survey research, said
pollsters had a harder time reaching voters with lower levels of education. Less-educated whites are the kind Mr. Obama has had trouble winning over. Conversely,
young people are more likely to answer surveys, and they tend to favor Mr. Obama.
There may be several factors at work: Michael Traugott, a University of Michigan professor who studies polling, argues that the Bradley effect was misnamed from the start;
the problem with the polls in the 1982 race was not that they failed to capture latent racism but that they failed to account for the absentee ballots, which ultimately handed the election to the white Republican, George Deukmejian.
Whatever its causes,
the Bradley gap seems to be disappearing.
In a new study, Daniel J. Hopkins, a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard,
considered 133 elections between 1989 and 2006 and found that
blacks running for office before 1996 suffered a median Bradley effect of 3 percentage points. Blacks running after 1996, however, performed about 3 percentage points better than their polls predicted. Mr. Hopkins argues that the changes in the welfare laws in 1996 and the decline of violent crime
took off the table issues that had aggravated racial animosity.
The Bradley effect in the 2006 vote was largely absent (and in some stances
a reverse effect was seen by some pollsters). In Tennessee, Harold Ford Jr., a black congressman, lost by six points. His pollster, Pete Brodnitz, said
the campaign had been watching for a Bradley effect and screened carefully to make sure
its own polls looked only at the people most likely to vote. Internal polls were largely correct, but some public polls, relying on a more general population, were wildly off. Mr. Brodnitz blamed bad polling, not lying.
In this year’s Democratic primaries, University of Washington researchers found a Bradley effect in three states, but a reverse Bradley effect in 12 (in the other 17, polls were within a seven-point margin of error).
[Note: And UW gets another shout-out, this time from The New York Times.]The results tended to correlate with the black population in a state:
blacks made up 15 percent or more of the population in almost all the states where the polls showed less support for Mr. Obama than there actually was; in the three states where polls showed more support than there was,
less than 10 percent of the population is black.
The differences are too great to be explained by just high black turnout, said Anthony Greenwald, one of the researchers. Nor were people necessarily lying. Instead, he sees a cultural dynamic at work:
the states where polls underpredicted support for Mr. Obama were generally in the Southeast, where the culture has more stubbornly favored whites, so the “right” answer there was to choose the white candidate. In the three states where polls in the study overpredicted support for Mr. Obama — Rhode Island, California and New Hampshire — “
the desirable thing is to appear unbiased and unprejudiced,” Mr. Greenwald said. (Many polling experts also believe that
Mr. Obama was benefiting from an Iowa bounce in the late New Hampshire polls, as Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton had been ahead for months, and that therefore
Mr. Obama’s loss there was not a true Bradley effect.)
The Bradley effect, Mr. Greenwald concluded, “has conceptually mutated.” “
It’s not something that’s an absolute that we should generally expect, but something that will
vary with the cultural context and the desirability of expressing pro-black attitudes.”
A further complication is
the race of the person who asks the questions. Talking to a white interviewer,
blacks or whites are more likely to say that they are supporting the white candidate; talking to a black interviewer, people are more likely to support the black candidate.
This holds true whether the surveys are in person, or on the phone.It could be that people worry about offending the interviewer by suggesting, “I wouldn’t vote for someone like you.” Or, researchers suggest,
talking to a black polltaker who sounds energetic or professional might prime positive images of blacks, overwhelming any negative stereotypes.
The trouble is, “
We don’t know that doing white-on-white interviews and black-on-black interviews would be more accurate,” said Jon Krosnick, a professor of psychology and political science at Stanford. “It is possible that right now the social norms within the African-American community are such that if you’re going to vote for McCain, it’s too embarrassing to admit, and if you’re not going to vote at all, it’s almost as embarrassing.”
The question of
how race affects polling is of course different from the question of
how it affects the vote. Many experts argue that
race does not play a huge role in either this year, because
the economy has emerged as such a dominant issue, and
Mr. Obama is not primarily identified by his race.
But most of what they know, they know from polls.
And even in the least complicated years, polling is a recipe with a good dash of “Who knows?”
My take?
Again, both articles note that the only three states in which Obama performed significantly below polling expectations are states in which he now commands double-digit polling leads, which means that he'd remain in the lead in those states even if "The Bradley Effect" is, in fact, still in effect.
Moreover, Obama is already showing significant gains, and even slight leads, in several Southern states, ALL of which McCain MUST win in order to win the election - by contrast, Obama could LOSE every Southern state and STILL win the election - so if there's
anything approaching a "Reverse Bradley" in effect, then it's
literally mathematically impossible for McCain to win the presidency.
