The "Bradley Effect"

[keita]

I've certainly seen this happen but I didn't know there was actually a term for it...

Bradley effect:
n. the difference between the number of people who vote for a black candidate and those who say they will or would.

(from "The Double-Tongued Dictionary" which records undocumented or under-documented words from the fringes of English, with a focus on slang, jargon, and new words.)


"The Bradley Effect" refers to an electoral phenomenon first identified in a 1982 California gubernatorial election.

Tom Bradley, the popular mayor of Los Angeles, was the supposed frontrunner in an open race for the state's top job. Polls showed the African-American Democrat running well ahead of white Republican candidate George Deukmejian. Yet, when the returns came in, Bradley lost by more than 50,000 votes.

The result made no sense. The gubernatorial election was one of the few Democratic losses in what was a good year for the party. Bradley was an able politician with a sound record. Analysts took a new look at the polls, which seemed to have been conducted appropriately.

They asked: What are we missing here?

Then they hit on the notion that white voters, not wanting to be thought of as prejudiced against an African-American candidate, had told pollsters they were for Bradley when they had always intended to vote for Deukmejian.

The phenomenon came to be referred to as "The Bradley Effect".

[keita]

The term "Bradley Effect" refers to a phenomenon which has led to inaccurate voter opinion polls in some American political campaigns between a white candidate and a non-white candidate.

Specifically, there have been instances in which statistically significant numbers of white voters tell pollsters in advance of an election that they are either genuinely undecided, or likely to vote for the non-white candidate, but those voters exhibit a different behavior when actually casting their ballots.

White voters who said that they were undecided break in statistically large numbers toward the white candidate, and many of the white voters who said that they were likely to vote for the black candidate ultimately cast their ballot for the white candidate. This reluctance to give accurate polling answers has sometimes extended to post-election exit polls as well.

Researchers who have studied the issue theorize that some white voters give inaccurate responses to polling questions because of a fear that they might appear to others to be racially prejudiced. Some research has suggested that the race of the pollster conducting the interview may factor into that concern. At least one prominent researcher has suggested that with regard to pre-election polls, the discrepancy can be traced in part by the polls' failure to account for general conservative political leanings among late-deciding voters.

[kitty]

Well Guys...

Looks like we will get a chance to see if the Bradley effect is still in effect...

Kitty