Paper Finds that Bradley/Wilder Effect Has Disappeared With Crime/Poverty issues

[Nym90]

Can you stop nitpicking the primary subpoint and actually answer my post please. 

I'll repeat it for you:


Do you see the infinite number or problems of using:
a single race, an affirmative action initiative, and person-to-person exit polling

to prove a point about

a larger phenomenon, a well-known multifacted politician with MANY non-racist reasons to dislike him (AA is sort of narrow of a topic), phone-interviews

when

All recent evidence, including parallel phone polling in 33 primaries relevant to this particular black candidate and multiple state-wide senate and governor races says the opposite?  You're grasping onto what, at best, is a tangent example, to disregard perhaps 50 ACTUAL examples.

Asking people, in person, how they feel about a racial issue like affirmative action might get them to lie when asking them on the phone who they're going to vote for might not.  You do understand the difference, right?

I think you're learning why good debaters (or lawyers for that matter in criminal trials and such) don't raise 10 good points, they only raise one or two and keep repeating them. The more points you raise, the easier it is for your opponent to latch onto one of them that might be slightly questionable and beat you over the head with it to cause you to lose credibility on your other 9 points without having to actually answer any of those 9 directly.

One race where there might have arguably been a Bradley effect is the Maryland 2006 Senate race. But yes, it was definitely not present and was possibly even in reverse in many other races (2006 PA Governor, OH Governor, TN Senate).

In the case of Tennessee I think the idea of a reverse Bradley effect makes some sense. Perhaps white voters there didn't want to admit publicly they were backing the black candidate but did so in the privacy of the voting booth; this could well happen in highly racially polarized areas.

[Nym90]

It might have occurred in Patrick's case in 2006, bit more of people saying they were undecided and voting for Healey.

http://campaigns.wikia.com/wiki/Deval_Patrick/Polls

http://www.surveyusa.com/client/PollReport.aspx?g=8d744a71-5bc6-43b9-bd0b-729d88f0f5ff&c=24

http://www.boston.com/news/politics/politicalintelligence/2006/10/new_poll_has_pa.html

http://www.boston.com/news/local/politics/candidates/articles/2006/10/25/poll_indicates_big_boost_in_patricks_lead/

Again not a great number of polls and not great ones.

This looks to be 2-9 points.

As the article Lunar quoted stated however, in races that are not close the polls tend to overstate the margin for the candidate leading.

[Nym90]

Not going to quibble on the details, all of the info is out there.  It is odd that out of the two polls on Nov. 6th you chose only the SUSA.  It's a bit unethical to ignore the other poll that taken the same day that showed a 22% margin, and a little shaky to ignore the SUSA taken the weak before that showed a 30% margin.  Actual result 24%.

 

The second poll was a university poll, and judging of how BRTD feels about them, and I agree to great extent, it isn't very good. 

Now, in 2006, we had five races where a black candidate ran statewide.  In four of them seems a very small under polling for the white candidate (arguably larger in MA) in the later polling.  It's not generally as large as it was in in 1980's, but it's hard to say it's gone.

Two problems:

1.  We don't have a large number of black candidates to look at.

2.  We don't have a number of solid polls to look at. 

That isn't enough to prove the Bradley Effect exists, but it isn't enough to say that it's gone away either.

There aren't enough historical examples to say for sure that it ever existed in the first place. There could be plenty of other reasons why the polls were off in the Bradley and Wilder races.

If I was a cynic, I'd say maybe whoever started the "Bradley effect" meme wanted to discourage parties from nominating black candidates.

[Nym90]

There aren't enough historical examples to say for sure that it ever existed in the first place. There could be plenty of other reasons why the polls were off in the Bradley and Wilder races.

If I was a cynic, I'd say maybe whoever started the "Bradley effect" meme wanted to discourage parties from nominating black candidates.

We've seen it, exceptionally pronounced, in two statewide races, CA (1982)and VA, that are not culturally similar.  Arguably we saw it almost as pronounced in Patrick in 2006.  The one place that we didn't see it was with Ford. 

The electability of candidates in the Fall didn't stop a number of candidates, so I don't find you "discouraging effect" to be reasonable, especially since we've never seen it in Primaries, even contemporary ones.

No, it was there, but I think it is diminishing over time.

I think it could well be there also, it makes some degree of sense logically, but I was just pointing out that the sample size is too small to prove that there ever was such an effect. If Bradley and Wilder were both left handed, that wouldn't prove a polling bias against southpaws either.

So when you say:

Two problems:

1.  We don't have a large number of black candidates to look at.

2.  We don't have a number of solid polls to look at.

That isn't enough to prove the Bradley Effect exists, but it isn't enough to say that it's gone away either.

You are making the assumption that it did exist, even though by your own admission the sample size is too small to prove this assumption. You can't argue that a small sample size means we can't prove it's gone away unless you admit that a small sample size also means we can't prove it ever existed to begin with.

[Nym90]

random musing: I wonder if there are more ex-Hillary supporters that lie about their vote (or being undecided) right now but will end up voting for Obama than Bradleyeffecters.

But wait, I thought the Hillary voters were supposed to be the Bradley effecters?