Race & Reading Between the Lines

My blogging buddy Will Bunch raises a creepy question this morning: Did the Bradley Effect play a role in Hillary Clinton's strong showing against Barack Obama in New Hampshire?

The Bradley Effect is the name that pundits give to a disturbing trend first noticed in elections in 1980s where white voters told pollsters they supported a black candidate and then voted for a white candidate once they got into the voting booth.

The effect is named for former Los Angeles Mayor Tom Bradley (photo), who ran for governor of California in 1982, built a comfortable lead in polls over Republican rival George Deukmejian but lost on Election Day. The same thing apparently happened to Virginia gubenatorial candidate Douglas Wilder, who led in the final polls in 1989 by nine percentage points but just barely won.

As Bunch notes:

"If white voters were misleading pollsters about their intentions in 2008, it would surely undercut the media storyline that Americans are transcending race in politics."

G. Terry Madonna, a whip-smart political scientist and pollster with whom I worked for years, isn't jumping to that conclusion.

He tells Bunch that he believes Clinton's better field operation, a lower youth turnout for Obama than in Iowa and a late rush of independents toward John McCain on the Republican side made the difference.

While we're sort of on the subject, the white-dominated news media does a notoriously bad job of gauging black voter preferences. This is because they succumb to the easy temptation to treat blacks a monolithic bloc and not people with as many world experiences and points of view as anybody else.

So you read it here first:

Obama cannot take for granted that black voters will gravitate to him just because he is black. (And probably won't.) He will have to earn their votes just like Clinton, who at this point in the campaign probably has more black support than he does.