The Obama campaign is quietly looking for ways to racist attitudes among voters going forward.
The evidence is murky, but his campaign believes the question is important enough to warrant study. When I asked a senior Obama adviser whether the Bradley effect was a possible explanation for the gap between the final poll numbers, which showed Obama leading by an average of eight points, and the ultimate outcome, he replied, “Definitely.” He added, “If so, then the question is: what’s different between Iowa and New Hampshire? It could be that the socially acceptable thing in front of your neighbor at a caucus could be different than what you do in a secret ballot. Obviously, that’s something we’re going to be trying to figure out as we go forward, primarily through polling. I know people are working on ways of asking questions about getting at people’s attitudes about race. We’re working on this.”
Since most voters won’t admit to having any racial bias, Obama’s campaign will have to be more creative with the questions they ask. Keith Reeves, a political scientist at Swarthmore, has studied the Bradley effect closely. In order to test for racial bias, he asked white voters about their attitudes toward welfare and blacks. Using a scale of one to seven, voters were asked to say if blacks as a group were more likely “to prefer to be self-supporting” or “to live on welfare.” Reeves told me, “That ends up being a very interesting predictor of how whites feel about African-Americans as a group but also whether they transpose those feelings onto the African-American who is running. It’s less likely to lend itself to social-desirability bias. Whites can answer that question without being seen as racist.”
Minority Reports [The New Yorker]
