Obama and the Bradley Effect

One thing I've been thinking about recently as Obama has increased his lead on McCain is whether a predicted blowout for the Dems will turn into Obama scraping by, as a small percentage of white voters change their minds last minute. Besides the fact that an important segment of the electorate makes up its mind last minute. The late deciders swung against Bush in 2000, costing him the popular vote, partly due to the DUI story that broke right before election day. They split evenly in '04, which sunk Kerry. What will they do now? Will they balk at electing our nation's first black president? There's of course the racist angle. There's also the lack of experience angle, which I have always defended as legitimate. McCain is not doing a very good job right now of portraying Obama as inexperienced. But there's still some time left, the late deciders haven't decided, and events could swing McCain's way. Obama could be peaking right now. The only good time to peak is right before the election. This campaign isn't over yet, and I continue to obsess about the possibility of an October surprise of an attack on Iran. McCain's numbers go up in a foreign policy crisis.

Concerning the Bradley Effect, Andrew Hacker writes:

Some people who are telling pollsters they're for Obama could actually be lying. Such behavior has been called the "Bradley Effect ," after Tom Bradley, a black mayor of Los Angeles who lost his bid to be California's governor back in 1982. While every poll showed him leading his white opponent, that isn't how the final tally turned out. Things haven't been far different in some other elections involving black candidates. In 1989, David Dinkins was eighteen points ahead in the polls for New York's mayoral election, but ended up winning by only a two-point edge. The same year, Douglas Wilder was projected to win Virginia's governorship by nine points, but squeaked in with one half of one percent of the popular vote. Nor are examples only from the past. In Michigan in 2006, the final polls forecast that the proposal to ban affirmative action would narrowly prevail by 51 percent. In fact, it handily passed with 58 percent. That's a Bradley gap of seven points, which isn't trivial. Since 1968, the Democratic Party has not been able to muster a majority of white Americans. Al Gore fell twelve percentage points behind among white voters in 2000, and John Kerry had a seventeen-point gap four years later.