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Women And The ?Bradley Effect?

[NOTE: This post has been UPDATED ... twice]

As pollsters, pundits, and politicians paw through the ashes of their burned predictions about the New Hampshire primary, the one explanation of their failure that has garnered by far the most speculation is the ?Bradley Effect,? named after Los Angeles mayor Tom Bradley.

Bradley had been well ahead in the polls going into a California gubernatorial election only to lose when actual votes were cast. The theory is that voters are embarrassed to tell pollsters that they will vote against a black candidate even when, because of their racial attitudes (either conscious or unconscious), they will not actually vote for a black. The same phenomenon has also been observed elsewhere, as in Virginia, where Doug Wilder was elected governor but by a much narrower margin than the polls had predicted. If you Google ?Bradley Effect? today, you?ll find far more than you have time to read, much of it about the surprising results in New Hampshire. It?s a theory that fits nicely into the view, pervasive on the left but evident elsewhere as well, that the United States remains a pervasively racist society.

Typical of much of the post-New Hampshire ?Bradley Effect? theorizing is the following from The Nation:

... there is good reason to suspect that The Bradley Effect was at work in New Hampshire. This is not to suggest that everyone who decided against voting for Obama was a racist. Nor is the point here that all those likely Democratic primary voters who said they were excited about Obama were lying. Rather, what needs to be understood is that voters in New Hampshire ? like voters in other states ? come to the polls with backgrounds and attitudes toward African-American candidates.

Even though The Nation tried ? unsuccessfully, I believe ? to deny that it necessarily regards these white voters as racist, in its view those ?backgrounds and attitudes? clearly disposed voters to vote against black candidates. If that?s not racism, it?s hard to know what The Nation thinks it is.

But wait a minute. It seems to me that at least one of the wheels on this ?Bradley Effect? bandwagon is badly broken. Insofar as that theory does explain why Obama did so much worse than all the polls, pundits, and politicians had predicted, it must be true that in New Hampshire only white women voters are afflicted with ?backgrounds and attitudes? that prevent them from voting for a black candidate.

Note the breakdown of the vote, as reported by CBS News from exit polls:

New Hampshire women went big for Clinton, supporting her 46 percent to 34 percent for Obama. And as 57 percent of the Democratic primary electorate, women were enough to make the difference. Among men, Obama turned the tables, beating Clinton 40 percent to 29 percent.

Who knew that white Democratic women were so much more racist than white Democratic men?

UPDATE [11 Jan.]

Andrew Kohut, president of the Pew Research Center, attempts here to explain why the polls were wrong in New Hampshire. He discounts poor polling methods, an undetected last minute trend for Hillary, or confusion caused by an unusually high turnout.

Well, then, what was it? You guessed:

... the longstanding pattern of pre-election polls overstating support for black candidates among white voters, particularly white voters who are poor.

What about women simply rallying to a beleagured, mistreated sister?

Women rallied to her (something they did not do in Iowa), while men leaned to Mr. Obama. Mrs. Clinton also got stronger support from older voters, while Mr. Obama pulled in more support among younger voters. But gender and age patterns tend not to be as confounding to pollsters as race, which to my mind was a key reason the polls got New Hampshire so wrong.

?Why,? Kohut asks,

didn?t this problem come up in Iowa? My guess is that Mr. Obama may have posed less of a threat to white voters in Iowa because he wasn?t yet the front-runner. Caucuses are also plainly different from primaries.

Kohut does not explain why white women voters were so much more affected by racial concerns than were white men voters.

UPDATE II [11 Jan.]

Here?s another race monger. Editor & Publisher asks, ?Did Race Bias Cost Obama A Win in New Hampshire?? This article, too, considers and dismisses various non-racial explanations for the poor polls, quoting various polling worthies along the way.

Frank Newport, head of the Gallup organization, said that his numbers did not support the idea that huge numbers of older women turned out and were not fully accounted for in the projections. Democratic party membership is now strongly tilted toward women.

?I think it?s very naive to dismiss the racial factors in this,? said Larry Sabato, professor of politics at the University of Virginia.....

Anytime you?ve got white undecided voters pulling the lever choosing between a white and a black candidate, that is when the race issue is most important,? Drew Westen of Emory University told Tom Edsall, the former Washington Post reporter now writing for Huffington Post. ?Both campaigns? internal polls showed a 10 to 12 point Obama lead; to see that evaporate into a three-point loss, when he didn?t have any gaffes, that has a ring to it.?

Again, no one here explained why ?race bias? was so much more prevalent among white New Hampshire female Democrats than white New Hampshire male Democrats.

Full post as published by Discriminations on January 10, 2008 (boomark / email).