A nightmare for Obama fans
2008-10-20 15:01
Atlanta - For supporters of Democratic
presidential candidate Barack Obama it is a nightmare scenario
- his apparent lead in the battle for the White House suddenly
evaporates on election day. The cause? Race.
As Republican rival John McCain celebrates victory, it
emerges that a small but decisive percentage of white voters
who had declared to opinion pollsters they supported Obama
actually chose differently in the privacy of the ballot booth.
With opinion surveys making Obama the favourite over McCain
less than three weeks before the November 4 election, attention has turned to the question of how many white Americans might be
lying to pollsters about their willingness to vote for a black
president.
The phenomenon is known as the "Bradley effect", after Tom Bradley, an African American who narrowly lost the 1982 California governor's election despite leading in polls.
His defeat surprised observers who concluded many white
voters had not been honest about their intentions. Ever since,
pollsters have tried to factor in the Bradley effect in
elections featuring black candidates.
Those concerns weighed heavily on John Estep as he
canvassed for Obama last week in the mainly white town of St
Bernard, Ohio, where he was once mayor.
"They will say in a poll, or say on the porch, 'I'll vote for Obama.' But I question how many will stick with a person of colour when they pull that (voting booth) curtain," said Estep.
Sensitive subject
"A lot will talk the talk but how many will walk the
walk?"
Analysts counter that since the 1970s, surveys have shown a
sharp decline in the number of voters who say they would not
vote for an African American for president.
Recent surveys have indicated that Obama's race is less of
an impediment to voters than McCain's age. At 72, McCain would be the oldest person to assume the US presidency.
The analysts also note that few people who are turned off
by a black candidate's race would likely vote Democrat anyway.
"The ... South is where you have a long-standing tradition
of racial polarisation (in voting)," said Merle Black,
professor of politics at Emory University in Atlanta. White
voters in the South have for decades favoured Republicans while
black voters nationally side with the Democratic Party.
White Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry only
gained 23% of the white vote in Georgia in 2004 and lost
the state, evidence that white voters prefer Republicans for
reasons of ideology rather than race, said Black.
Race is a sensitive subject in the United States because of
the country's history of slavery and racial segregation, and
continued social inequality between white Americans and black
Americans, who form about 13 percent of the population.
Diversity
Politicians rarely address it directly and both the Obama
and McCain campaigns downplay the idea the some whites might
not be speaking honestly about their voting plans.
The diversity of the US electorate makes it hard to
quantify the phenomenon, pollsters say. An older voter in South
Florida may be of the same race as a young union member in
Virginia or a businesswoman in Colorado but share little else.
The Democratic primaries in which voters in the states
picked the party's presidential candidate painted a mixed
picture of the potential for a Bradley effect. In some states,
Obama got fewer white votes than expected but in South Carolina
and elsewhere it was the opposite.
Commentator Earl Ofari Hutchinson said there was a
potential for the Bradley effect to be decisive, and that Obama
might need a 10% lead in opinion polls to be sure of
overcoming it.
"The big question is, can the dire straits that the economy
is in ... offset any penchant on the part of the white voters
to lie to pollsters?" Hutchinson said.
"It depends on how deeply someone has racial bias (and if)
that person feels that Obama can do something for him or her."
The latest Reuters/C-SPAN/Zogby poll gave Obama a 4-point
national lead.
Pollster John Zogby said he took the prospect
of overstating white support for Obama very seriously.
Zogby tries to factor any potential Bradley effect into his
polling but said he believes it will be negligible, in part
because estimates of Obama's support had proved accurate during the primaries.
Even so, Zogby added a note of caution, "I don't see it as a big factor but I may learn a lot on election day."
- Reuters