I haven’t addressed the Bradley Effect as a factor to account for Clinton’s surprise victory in N.H. It never made any sense to me that it would be significant enough to account for a ten-point swing. The explanations based on women identifying with the embattled Hillary made more sense. And indeed John Judis has the data to support that that’s what happened.
In response to Andrew Kohut’s modified case for the Bradley effect, he says:
As you can see, Obama’s support among New Hampshire Democrats without college degrees [who, according to Kohut, are more likely to have racist attitudes] slightly increased from the pre-election poll to the exit poll. There was an increase in Clinton’s support among voters with only a high school degree or less, but there was also a slightly smaller increase among Obama voters from this group. Where Clinton dramatically picked up support from the pre-election poll to the final poll was among voters with college degrees and higher. That’s exactly the opposite of what Kohut’s version of the Bradley effect would predict.
Here we come to a far more likely explanation (albeit one of several) for why the pre-election polls were wrong: Women–and college-educated women in particular– shifted to Clinton. The polls show that while four percent of men switched over to Clinton, 12 percent of women did. Since there was very little change among voters without college degrees, one must infer that the bulk of the change came from women voters with college degrees. And it seems unlikely that racism can help to explain that, since well-educated women may be the least racist sub-group in American society.
Read Judis’s full post for a fuller explanation if you still think it was a factor. For me the Bradley Effect never made any sense to explain New Hampshire. Sure, there are lots of racists out there who would never vote for a black man, but in the Democratic primaries, at this early point, voters who have residual racists attitudes would have no reason to say they’re for Obama and then vote otherwise. They’d just say they’re for one of the other candidates whose positions are similar to Obama’s. No cause to lie to pollsters to keep their racism hidden.
The Bradley Effect may come into play if Obama wins the nomination and voters are given the choice between him and McCain or Romney. There might be a quite a few folks who would vote Democrat on the issues or because they’re sick of Republican corruption, but vote Republican anyway because they don’t want a black guy with "Hussein" as a middle name as their president. It would make sense that many of these people would be ashamed to admit that to a pollster. You know the Limbaugh/FOX News crowd is going to make hay with that aspect of the election, and we all know it’s going to play a big factor when it comes down to voters finally deciding on who they feel most comfortable with in the White House. But it wasn’t a factor in New Hampshire.
UPDATE: NYT article makes same point about women, even those inclined toward Obama, uniting to prevent Hillary from being humiliated. It also develops the theme I introduced in this post and in the comments section about how the key to understanding N.H and perhaps the rest of the race is that women feel a deeper bond with Hillary as an underdog than they do with her as the frontrunner.
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