Less than a week before the 1989 election for Virginia governor, two newspaper polls showed L. Douglas Wilder, a black Democrat, comfortably ahead of his GOP opponent by between 9 and 11 points. But when the ballots were counted, it was a nail-biter that Wilder won by fewer than 7,000 votes.
Political scientists dubbed it “the Wilder effect,” or referred to it by its earlier name, “the Bradley effect,” after Tom Bradley, the black mayor of Los Angeles who lost the 1982 California governor’s contest despite being up in the polls by as much as 22 points in the weeks before Election Day.
“The Wilder effect, the Bradley effect, is on the minds of everybody, without exception,” Neil Newhouse, who directs NBC News/Wall Street Journal polling, said, referring to what pollsters say is the phenomenon of some white people lying to pollsters about their support for black candidates.
The experiences of Bradley and Wilder loom ominously over Barack Obama’s presidential campaign, although opinion about the evidence of racially skewed polling in the election is mixed, political analysts said, and it was not seen in the Democratic primaries.
A GOP pollster, who requested anonymity to speak candidly, said that his surveys suggested polls were slightly overestimating support for Obama.
A Democratic pollster, who also would not be quoted by name, said that when he surveyed Pennsylvania union members — who as a group tend to be older, white and working class — he found a striking 20 percent difference between how whites responded when questioned by blacks and how they responded when questioned by other whites.
But many pollsters, citing the vastly improved track record among black politicians in elections over the past decade, said they believed that the problem of whites lying to pollsters about their support for black candidates was largely a thing of the past.
“The Bradley effect is an historical artifact,” said David Bositis, one of the top analysts of black demographics, polling and politics.
“The race question is a bit dated,” said Steve Elmendorf, deputy campaign manager for 2004 Democratic nominee John F. Kerry.
“Conventional wisdom is that race will cost any African-American candidate 1 to 5 points,” Elmendorf said. But Obama was drawing new voters to the rolls, particularly young people and African-Americans, and his Democratic primary victory showed a new political calculus at play. “I think this election is a little different,” he said.
Still, the memory is fresh, and political analysts said they remain concerned that the first presidential bid by a black major-party nominee could lead to old problems re-emerging.
“I have a concern that going into Election Day, in a dead heat, there could be some drop-off in support of Obama, of 1 or 2 points, because some voters are conflicted about race in this election,” said Joe Trippi, a Democratic strategist who was Bradley’s deputy campaign manager in 1982.
Pollsters said they remain especially sensitive to the Bradley effect, saying that some portion of whites claim to back Obama because they believe that’s what black interviewers want to hear.
Democratic pollster Celinda Lake said her polling found that “whites interviewed by blacks are 3 to 5 percent more supportive of Obama than whites interviewed by whites.” She said the effect was “most concentrated” among older whites who did not attend college.
But officials at other polling companies said they had not detected major problems with whites lying to black questioners.
In a review of 26,000 interviews conducted in September, the Gallup Poll “found no difference in the presidential vote choice of either black or white respondents based on the race of the interviewer,” said Gallup chief Frank Newport.
The NBC News/Wall Street Journal pollsters studied thousands of their interviews and came to the same conclusion.
“We took a hard look ourselves — it’s too important,” Newhouse said. “I was surprised to see that there was literally no difference. It was within a point or two,” and therefore not statistically significant.
Obama’s own internal polling similarly did not detect a significant Bradley effect, a campaign source said in an interview in August.
“Race of interviewer may make some difference, but I’m not a great believer that pollsters are being lied to because of the Bradley effect,” said Andy Kohut, a former director of Gallup who now heads the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press. Sampling error is a bigger problem, he said. “My continuous concern are the people we are not getting, because I know the people who are more likely not to do surveys have more negative views about African-Americans.”
Bositis agreed, in part because “the novelty of black candidates has worn off.”
“This election is, for the most part, not about Barack Obama. This election is about throwing the in team out,” he said. “And Barack Obama is the captain of our team.”
Wilder, now the mayor of Richmond, said that pre-election polls in his 1989 gubernatorial race undersampled GOP voters in Virginia, although there was a Bradley effect, as well, he said.
“I didn’t believe double-digit figures,” Wilder recalled. “Our internal polling showed us plus or minus 2 — a dead heat.”
But, he added, “I think quite honestly there was more of the Bradley effect than bad polling, in terms of exit polls.” And Wilder said he remains concerned that “raw racism, ... coupled with fears about who is going to be a leader, coupled with who has the right experience,” could alter the November election.
“Racism has not gone away,” Wilder said, “nor will it ever.”
