I'll just make the first substantive post here and say that I hope that this election once and for all put to rest the nonsense the media has been spouting about the "Bradley/Wilder Effect." There was no evidence that such an effect has existed within the past decade certainly and the polls in this election closely mirrored the end result. I think one of these two things are probably true.
1) All the people who would have lied to pollsters and either said they were undecided or said they were for the AA candidate in previous generations when they really were never going to vote for the AA candidate are today are able to find more socially acceptable reasons to reject the AA candidate (at least when he's a Democrat). For example, they can say "he doesn't share my values" or something like that. (This isn't to imply that all people or even most who list that as a reason for not voting for Obama in particular and AA candidates in general are closet racists, just that this is one socially acceptable way to reject a candidate that's generic enough to hide the racism of some voters).
2) America has simply moved past the issue of voters voting on the basis of race in significant numbers.
I'd like to think the answer is 2 and I truly believe we are moving more towards 2 being the answer, but anyone who watched some of the clips of interviews with West Virginia voters during the primaries in particular knows that this isn't the 100% answers. I think it's a lot of #2 and a little of #1.
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I don't know if there ever was a Bradley effect. I believe polls were truly horrible back then and maybe still are truly horrible with a lone voice of reason. (See FiveThirtyEight.com's article about one particular poll where the young voters sampled broke predominantly for McCain - the pollster basically threw out some unscientific data to the world and hoped no one would notice).
ReplyDeleteHave we moved beyond race as an issue - it remains to be seen. Let's see what happens in an election when American's actually have a non-AA viable nominee to vote for. Is it just me or do other people think that any democrat could have beaten McCain given the last 8 years and last couple of months? However, Obama's election is an important step forward, and, if he does a decent job, will make the next AA candidate's road to victory much easier.
In a side note, I am glad that I can now get my fantasy baseball projections and political projections from the same source. It truly is a brave new world.
I don't know that any Democrat would have won, but I do think Hillary Clinton would have won, which is the only other realistic option from this cycle. I'm not sure I'd describe McCain as "non-viable." I actually think that he did as well or better than certainly any of the other options from the primary would have done.
ReplyDeleteAlthough I say Hillary would have won, I think it would have been a lot closer. I think that if she had been the nominee you can take VA and NC and clearly IN out of the Blue column. She may have won the rest of the states Obama won, but I could just as easily see this as coming down yet again to a battle over FL and OH if Hillary was the nominee.
I suspect there are still plenty of racists out there. The thing is, it seems that many of them vote GOP.
ReplyDeleteNow I'm not suggesting there aren't bigoted liberals out there, but by it's very nature the Left tends to more effectively weed out folks with those types of beliefs.
As for a measurable Bradley Effect, I'm not using this election as evidence one way or the other. Obama is such a singualr figure that even if such an effect exists, he would be largely immune to it.
As to the Republican/Democratic racist issue, clearly it used to be that the hardest core of the racists were the southern democrats. Then LBJ pushed through the Civil Rights Act and "the party left" those people, even if some of those people didn't leave the party. There still seems to be a substantial vestige of southern democrats who never vote for the national democratic candidates. I can't help think these people are the old school Democrats and some of their progeny who register democrat out of tradition, but don't believe in much that the party believes in nowadays. A lot of these people, I suspect, were one of the cores of Hillary Clinton's base in places like West Virginia, Kentucky and other places of that nature.
ReplyDeleteAnyway, I think it's a good point that Obama is somewhat of a "one off" candidate. My position on the Bradley Effect at this point, however, is that the burden of proof is on those who say it does exist, not on those who say it doesn't, as it at the very least didn't show up in Obama's national race and didn't show up in Harold Ford's run for the Senate in Tennessee. I think people get confused sometimes, however, (though I don't think matt was confused) that the Bradley Effect isn't that there are racists that won't vote for a black guy or even that there are people who say they'll vote for the black guy but really wind up voting for the white guy. To the extent it ever existed, it was mostly in the form of people saying they were "undecided" when they really were never in any universe going to vote for a black man.