For the Media

The “Bradley effect” or “Bradley-Wilder effect” immediately became part of the popular political vernacular after this year’s New Hampshire primary. These terms describe the phenomenon whereby black candidates--most notably Tom Bradley, Douglas Wilder and David Dinkins--perform significantly poorer at the ballot box then in pre-election polls. The gap is thought to result from white voters telling pollsters (especially African-American interviewers) they are willing to vote for black candidates, but then voting their racial prejudices behind the curtain. When Barack Obama lost in spite of his large leads in all the polls, political commentators assumed this process had once again reared its ugly head.

A new study out of Harvard by Daniel J. Hopkins (forthcoming), however, suggests that the Bradley effect is a thing of the past. His key finding is that there was a significant disparity between the poll numbers and actual vote tallies of African-Americans seeking statewide offices before the mid 1990s, but that black candidates’ vote shares are in line with what we’d expect from the polls since then. Perhaps more importantly, Hopkins’s analysis of the 2008 primary indicates that Barack Obama slightly outperformed his poll numbers.

If there is one thing I’ve learned in studying the impact of race in this election, though, it’s that it’s often difficult to make predictions from applying extant racial voting literature. The novelty of Obama’s general election campaign simply makes it hard to say a priori whether this unbiased trend Hopkins documents will continue into November or if it will activate considerations that originally produced the Bradley effect in the 1980s.

Yet even if some respondents are merely supporting Obama in the polls for social desirability purposes, there is a real chance that this Bradley effect could be offset by the cell phone effect. As many know, almost all national surveys are conducted on landline respondents only. Despite the fact that roughly 15 percent of the population and about one-third of 18-24 year olds are thought to only be reachable by cell phone, their absence up until very recently did not introduce discernable bias into polling numbers. Prior to this summer, earlier comparisons of landline and cell phone respondents by Pew Research Center, for example, “indicate that when data from both the landline and cell samples are combined and weighted to match the U.S. population on selected demographic measures, the results for key political measures (such as presidential approval, Iraq policy, presidential primary voter preference, and party affiliation) are virtually identical to those from the landline survey alone.” Or in other words, no bias existed because cell-onlies and landliners from the same demographic groupings have similarly distributed opinions.

Last week, however, Pew released its third comparative study of the summer showing that similarly situated landliners and cell-onlies substantially differ in their rates of support for Obama Cell only respondents under thirty, for instance, favor Obama over McCain by 35 percentage points, compared to only a 13 point Obama edge for landliners in this age group. As a result, adding in cell-phone responders with their parallel landline surveys increases aggregate support for Obama by 2 to 3 points.

Pew’s cell-only samples were unfortunately conducted on sample sizes much smaller than typical surveys. This necessarily limits the statistical confidence we can put in these results. Nevertheless, we should be much more confident in this evidence of under-support in polls for Obama then the endless media speculation about over-support due to a Bradley effect that may very well no longer exist.

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