Word of the Week: Bradley Effect

Bradley effect: The purported cause of a discrepancy between voter opinion polls and election results in a race between a white and a nonwhite candidate. The term is named for Tom Bradley (1917–1998), the first African-American mayor of Los Angeles, who led by a substantial margin in the polls but lost the 1982 California gubernatorial election to his white opponent, Republican George Deukmejian. The phenomenon is less commonly known as the Wilder effect, after Douglas Wilder of Virginia, the first African-American governor in the United States.

William Safire devoted his "On Language" column in yesterday's New York Times Magazine to the Bradley effect. About the unexpected outcome of the Bradley race, he writes: "Speculation ranged from inaccurate sampling, to last-minute mind-changes, to latent racism, to freely lying voters, to the reluctance of those being polled to admitting a preference that may be socially unacceptable — anti-black — in talking to interviewers."

The Bradley effect has surfaced in coverage of the current presidential campaign, too. Safire again:

The phrase burst out of the starting gate of this year’s presidential campaign in the coverage of Hillary Clinton’s comeback victory in the nation’s first primary election in January. Barack Obama, victor in the Iowa caucus, had been polling ahead of Clinton but lost by 2.6 points. “Did ‘The Bradley Effect’ Beat Obama in New Hampshire?” headlined the liberal Nation magazine over a posting by John Nichols. John McWorter [sic: it's McWhorter] of The New York Sun concluded the answer was no, under the headline “Bradley Effect, R.I.P.”

Read the McWhorter op-ed piece here. McWhorter, a linguist (and an African-American), is not "of the New York Sun" but is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a conservative think tank.¹

Read my post about other eponymous effects (Doppler, Droste, Forer, etc.) here.

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¹ Safire—who once was a Nixon speechwriter and has proclaimed himself a John McCain supporter—provides a citation from "the liberal Nation magazine" but doesn't identify the slant of the Manhattan Institute. Not to belabor this, but that liberal article appeared in a Nation blog, not in the pages of the magazine itself.

Comments

[Nick]

Polls are only effective if they do two things: use a truely representitive sample and collect information that accurately predicts what voters will do.
Polls that collect information from only urban areas could be the cause of the Bradely Effect. Polls that are too long or worded in a confusing or slanted manner could also show very different results from actual voting.
In a sense, polling is a branch of testing and seems to be a hit and miss proposition to me because there really is no way to test the reliability of a poll until an election is over and then no one seems to want to minutely pick it apart and check to see how well it matched voters motivations and choices even if it did correctly predict a winner.

[votetheday.com]

Is it possible, that Obama's lead could evaporate on election day because of Bradley-Wilder effect? Or nowadays Americans are significantly less reluctant to vote for an African-American? Vote here - http://www.votetheday.com/america/secret-racism-will-subvert-obamas-advantage-333