Bradley Effect Disappearance Hypotheses

There has been a ton of talk lately about whether or not we can really trust the presidential polls, given the nefarious Bradley Effect that seems to spoil the chances of black candidates. At the risk of being repetitive, the Bradley Effect - named for Tom Bradley, former mayor of LA and one time California gubernatorial candidate - is the phenomenon whereby the outcomes of an election are significantly less favorable to a black candidate than reliable, pre-election polls had predicted. This is more complicated than straight-up racism, because the effect relies upon people being dishonest to pollsters.

Nate has a great analysis of various elements of the effect, and he rehashes a lot of the evidence that it no longer exists, which we have discussed here. Where Nate gets novel, however, is in discussing WHY the effect might have disappeared. There's a lot of good stuff, but here's something that strikes me as very relevant:

4. There may be some relationship to the revival of the religious right in the 1990s. For members of the religious right, there are now ample and automatic reasons to vote against any liberal candidate, a.k.a. their positions on issues like abortion. In addition, the religious right has made voting along cultural grounds (as opposed to policy grounds) more socially acceptable in general. So long as the voter believes he or she can articulate a "valid" reason for voting against an African-American candidate, there is little reason to deceive a pollster about one's intention."

I think this is a brilliant analysis. Rather than having to articulate an electoral preference based on foreign policy positions or fiscal views, folks now have the comfort of saying things like "He's okay with dudes kissing each other, so I hate him," or "He thinks that a teenager who is raped by her father shouldn't have to bring the pregnancy to term, so I can't vote for him," and there is a cultural justification for saying so. It can go the other way too, of course ("He won't let my brother and his partner adopt, so I'm voting against him" ... obviously, I actually think this sounds reasonable, but that's another story.) In any event, it does seem like our modern culture wars make it remarkably easy to find socially acceptable stand-ins for racial preference.

-Education Dude