Sunday, October 19, 2008
News, Politics

Obama, Georgia and racism

“There probably are fewer racists in society today.”—UGA political scientist Charles Bullock

Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama greets workers in Ohio last week.
EMMANUEL DUNAND/AFP/Getty Images.

By Stephanie Ramage

In 1982, former Los Angeles Mayor Tom Bradley, a Democrat, ran for governor of California. On the eve of the election, Bradley, who was black, was 7 points ahead in the polls. Yet he lost.
 
The prevailing opinion at the time was that white voters didn’t want pollsters to think they were racist, so they basically lied about supporting Bradley, went into the voting booth, and voted for his opponent.

Since then, there have been insights into how an 11th-hour influx of absentee Republican ballots may have played a role, and how a handgun initiative on the ballot may have attracted more Republican voters than expected. But subsequent elections also turned up something that looked suspiciously like what had been dubbed “the Bradley effect”: The following year, Harold Washington won Chicago’s mayoral race by a margin of about four points, though polls had put him substantially further ahead of his rivals. New York Mayor David Dinkins experienced the same misleading poll results in 1989, as did Virginia’s Democratic gubernatorial candidate, Douglas Wilder, that same year.

“With Doug Wilder in Virginia, not only did the people tell the pollsters one thing before voting, they actually lied to the pollsters in the exit polls,” says University of Georgia political scientist Charles Bullock. “That was just minutes after casting their votes.”

But times have changed. Bullock recently examined the polls and election results of five statewide campaigns in 2006 involving black candidates, and found that the candidates usually polled lower than they performed in the election—the opposite of the Bradley effect. For example, in his attempt to win a U.S. Senate seat in Tennessee, Harold Ford Jr. did worse in the polls than he did at the polls.

“On average, he was polling at 44 percent and some change, and he actually got 48 percent of the vote,” says Bullock.

Similarly, Deval Patrick, a Democrat running for governor of Massachusetts—a state that’s more than 80 percent white, according to the U.S. Census Bureau—could claim only 53 percent of the vote in the polls, but actually won with 56 percent of the vote. Lynn Swann, a Republican gubernatorial candidate in Pennsylvania, got 36 percent of survey respondents polled, but 40 percent of the vote. Republican Ken Blackwell’s poll numbers in Ohio didn’t lie: He polled at 37 percent, exactly what he got in his failed bid for the governor’s office. Only one of the five, Republican Michael Steele, who ran for the U.S. Senate seat to be vacated by retiring Sen. Paul Sarbanes in Maryland, polled higher than the number he actually won: Forty-five percent in the polls, and 44 percent at the voting booth.

“There probably are fewer racists in society today,” says Bullock. “We now have an electorate who have spent their entire careers in integrated workplaces and went to integrated schools, and they don’t remember desegregation.”

Zoltan L. Hajnal, a political scientist at University of California-San Diego, says this year’s Democratic primaries are an example of the phenomenon Bullock found. 

“There were more cases where [Democratic presidential candidate Barack] Obama polled less than he actually got,” he says, adding that polls are likely more accurate now than they were 26 years ago, when Bradley ran for governor of California.

“I wouldn’t go so far as to say that race is irrelevant,” he says. “It’s just not so embarrassing now to say that you will support or not support a black candidate. Across the country, white voters have been willing to support black candidates. They are more familiar than they were decades ago, and less threatening.”

Hajnal’s research shows that about 40 percent of Americans have lived in or near cities that have elected black mayors, or in states with black governors. Data compiled by the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies shows that in 2001, about 16 percent of black state legislators nationally were representing mostly white districts, but just six years later, in 2007, that number had grown to 30 percent. UGA’s Bullock notes that of Georgia’s 13 Congressional districts, two are mostly white but represented by blacks—Congressman Sanford Bishop represents the 2nd District, and Congressman David Scott represents the 13th.
 
Part of the reason for the trend, says Hajnal, is that other minorities have moved into the U.S. in significant numbers.

“The black community is not the threat it once was,” he says. “The black population is not growing in many communities.”

Tom Smith, a social scientist with the University of Chicago’s National Opinion Research Center, says Obama is proof of how comfortable white voters have become with black leadership.

“The fact that we have an African-American Democratic candidate says a lot,” says Smith. “We’ve never had, a presidential race, a black candidate. The point is, there is every reason to believe the Bradley effect has diminished over time.”

The Bradley effect may never really have existed at all. David Bositis at the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies used to work with one of the pollsters in the Bradley race, and says some of the pollsters at the time believed “it was just a bad poll.” The progress made by blacks in politics since then is undeniable, he says, and points to Georgia as a prime example of that progress.

“In 2002, the redneck’s friend, Roy Barnes, trailed Thurbert Baker by about 10 percent in the election,” Bositis says, referring to the fact that Barnes, a white Democrat, lost to Republican Sonny Perdue 52 percent to 46 percent, but Baker, a black Democrat running for attorney general, won with almost 56 percent of the vote. In 2006, Baker led the statewide Democratic ticket with more than 57 percent of the vote, and won 122 of Georgia’s 159 counties, including traditional Republican strongholds like Cobb, Henry, Douglas and Carroll.

“I get the impression that a lot of the people who bring up the Bradley effect do so to cheer the troops, hoping that Obama will lose,” says Bositis, “as if some kind of racial magic will play out.”

So what does Bositis think will happen?

“I think Obama will get a considerably higher share of the white vote than John Kerry got, than Clinton got, or than any recent presidential candidate has gotten.” SP