#71 Not-So-Latent Local Racism

Yesterday we put up several Democratic candidate signs in our front yard. This morning all but one were still up. The Obama-Biden sign was missing. So I drove around our neighborhood and saw that, during the night, all Obama signs had been removed in the six square block area--from Blaine to Hayes, from Sixth to Third. The other Democratic candidate signs, for local and statewide offices, were still standing in the light rain that fell this morning.

I can reach only one conclusion: some not-so-latent racists were busy in the dark. It's annoying of course, and violates our freedom of speech.

But it also reinforces my concern that the polls this year may be particularly inaccurate. If racists do their dirty work in the dark, might they also be concealing their true vote preferences?

On September 27, Sam Wang published online a discussion of a large-scale empirical study by Harvard political scientist Dan Hopkins. Wang cites Hopkins' findings that, since the mid-1990s, the Bradley effect [named after former Los Angeles mayor Tom Bradley] has disappeared. The "Bradley effect" occurred when a non-white candidate falls short of the result projected by opinion polls on Election Day when he/she runs against a white candidate.

Wang explains: "Tom Bradley, a black man, lost the 1982 governor’s race despite the fact that in opinion polls taken before the election he led George Deukmejian, a white man. Sometimes it is also called the Wilder effect, after Gov. Doug Wilder of Virginia, who had a comfortable lead by nearly 10 percentage points in his 1990 campaign, but only won by a whisker."

Hopkins' study indicates that "Polls did show a significant Bradley/Wilder effect through the early 1990s, which includes the period when Bradley and Wilder were running for office. However, Hopkins notes that the effect then went away in races from 1996 onward. To quote the study: 'Before 1996, the median gap for black candidates was 3.1 percentage points, while for subsequent years it was -0.3 percentage points.' "

Of course, people can change their minds at the last moment about whom they wish to vote for. Still, I'm concerned by the possibility of people masking their intentions when they take part in this year's polls. And many people choose not to participate in the polls at all. Hence, I don't know how applicable to this year's election Hopkins' study truly is, and specifically how accurate the polls will turn out to be. Our neighborhood's disappearing Obama signs give additional cause to raise that question.

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