During the 1990s, UK TV series Spitting Image included a song "Thank You Tory Voters", listing disasters caused by the Conservative government. One memorable line was "Voting Tory’s like a fart, no-one admits they’ve done it".
This was the point at which opinion pollsters noticed something interesting: Conservatives would routinely lose in every opinion poll, and then win the election. Studies were carried out, and it turned out that a surprisingly large number of people were so embarrassed by their support for the Tories that they would routinely tell opinion pollsters one thing, and then vote differently in the privacy of the voting booth.
People are starting to ask whether something similar might be happening in the US Democratic voter base. Here, it’s known as The Bradley Effect. And it’s real:
Deep-seated racial misgivings could cost Barack Obama the White House if the election is close, according to an AP-Yahoo News poll that found one-third of white Democrats harbor negative views toward blacks — many calling them "lazy," "violent" or responsible for their own troubles.
[...]
Given a choice of several positive and negative adjectives that might describe blacks, 20 percent of all whites said the word "violent" strongly applied. Among other words, 22 percent agreed with "boastful," 29 percent "complaining," 13 percent "lazy" and 11 percent "irresponsible." When asked about positive adjectives, whites were more likely to stay on the fence than give a strongly positive assessment.
Among white Democrats, one-third cited a negative adjective and, of those, 58 percent said they planned to back Obama.
Emphasis mine.
So a third of Democratic voters are racists. Imagine what the statistics for Republicans must look like.
The survey team also used Implicit Association Testing:
The survey broke ground by incorporating images of black and white faces to measure implicit racial attitudes, or prejudices that are so deeply rooted that people may not realize they have them. That test suggested the incidence of racial prejudice is even higher, with more than half of whites revealing more negative feelings toward blacks than whites.
One Response to “The Bradley Effect”
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September 24th, 2008 at 10:59 -0600
Pollsters over here know about the inbuilt bias against the Tories over here and compensate, in the same way that they compensate for a whole bunch of other factors.
What would be interesting to know is whether the pollsters are compensating for racial bias and if so how. After all, this may be the first time that they’ve polled a presidential race involving a black candidate but it’s not the first time they’ve polled any election involving a black candidate.
The other factor which will play is that while Obama is black, there may be questions about how black he’s actually seen as. I’m sure many of us know people who hold racist views despite happily having black/asian friends, the two things being entirely separate in their minds. Similarly I wonder about whether people really see Obama as “black”, or whether the negative views drop away somewhat when they’re faced with an well presented, educated, articulate individual rather than the more negative stereotype they have in their head.