Newsweek... "Debunking the Bradley effect!"

[aaaaaa5a]

Good article in Newsweek about the myth of the "Bradley effect."



From the Newsweek article:


Take the recent study by Harvard fellow Daniel Hopkins, who examined the performances of African-American candidates in major electoral races from the 1980s through the present day. Hopkins found that the Bradley effect did exist during the '80s and early '90s. But it dissipated sometime thereafter; recent black candidates like Deval Patrick and Harold Ford Jr. have performed almost exactly as their polls predicted ahead of time. Hopkins theorized that this was because many hot-button racial issues, like crime and welfare, had been taken off the table by the centrist reforms of the Clinton administration.


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Then there are this year's primaries. Everyone remembers New Hampshire, when nearly all polls predicted a big win for Obama, but Hillary Clinton emerged victorious. That was a bad day for the pollsters—and for Obama, who underperformed the Pollster.com composite average by 9 points. (Still, it is not clear that there was evidence of the Bradley effect at work here. Contributing factors to Obama's loss may have included his "nice enough" comment, Senator Clinton's teary moment in the diner—and a simultaneous GOP primary, which allowed McCain to pick off some Obama voters who thought their guy was safely ahead.) What fewer remember is what happened two weeks later in South Carolina. In that case, the Pollster projection had Obama winning by 15 points—but he won by 29. That 14-point error was actually of greater magnitude than the mistake in New Hampshire, if less noticeable because the polls hadn't picked the wrong horse.


---------snip---------------------


With so many "X factors" like race, cell phones and turnout, there is probably an extra margin of error this year. And polls aren't terrifically accurate to begin with. But there is no reason to conclude that the polls are systematically overestimating Obama's support; the reverse is at least as likely to be true. McCain, in all likelihood, will need to win this election fair and square—which means that he has his work cut out for him.


Full article here.


http://www.newsweek.com/id/165030


It's a good read.