Fascinating: Reverse Bradley Effect

There has been a lot of chatter lately about the possible impact of the Bradley Effect on the election. In a sign of the times, a few folks have begun postulating that the election may also be impacted by a reverse Bradley effect.

The Reverse Bradley Effect...what the heck is that?

In a nutshell, it's when a black candidate, in this case Obama obviously, receives a higher portion of the actual vote than was predicted by the pre-election polls. From Politico.com based on a Pew Research Study...

[Researchers] found a reverse Bradley effect in 12 primary states. In these states they found actual support for Obama exceeded pre-election polls by totals of 7 percent or more, well beyond the polls’ margins of error. These errors ranged up to 18 percent in Georgia.

“The Bradley effect has mutated. We are seeing it in several states, but the reverse effect is much stronger,” said Greenwald.

Albertson and Greenwald believe the errors in the polls are being driven by social pressures that can operate when voters are contacted by telephone prior to an election. They said that polls from states in the Southeast predicted a large black vote for Obama and a much weaker white vote. They found that, in a few Southeast states, exit polls showed that both whites and blacks gave more votes to Obama than the pre-election polls had predicted.

“Blacks understated their support for Obama and, even more surprising, whites did too. There also is some indication that this happened in such Republican states as Montana, South Dakota, Oklahoma, Missouri and Indiana,” Greenwald said.

In other words, some white folks don't want to admit that they plan to vote for "That One" and some black folks don't admit it either...at least during the primaries.

The passage below from fivethirtyeight.com relates a canvasser's experience in western PA. It isn't a direct example of the Reverse Bradley Effect but it still says a lot on a couple different levels...

So a canvasser goes to a woman's door in Washington, Pennsylvania. Knocks. Woman answers. Knocker asks who she's planning to vote for. She isn't sure, has to ask her husband who she's voting for. Husband is off in another room watching some game. Canvasser hears him yell back, "We're votin' for the n***er!"

Woman turns back to canvasser, and says brightly and matter of factly: "We're voting for the n***er."

Next up: The cell phone effect