LAYING TO REST THE MYTH OF THE ‘BRADLEY EFFECT’
By Ken Khachigian
The Star-Ledger (Newark, New Jersey)
November 4, 2008 Tuesday
They call it the "Bradley effect."
Pundits and politicians speak of it in ominous tones. It surfaced in
New Hampshire in January, when Barack Obama’s eight-point lead on the
eve of that state’s primary dissolved into a shocking come-from-behind
victory for Hillary Rodham Clinton. Could it have been the Bradley
effect? Chris Matthews of "Hardball" and a host of other talking
heads thought so.
As Obama continues to hold a lead in the presidential polls against
John McCain, the specter of the Bradley effect still haunts the
race. It’s a reference to the 1982 California governor’s race, which
Los Angeles Mayor Tom Bradley, an African-American, lost to state
Attorney General George Deukmejian even though an election-eve poll
showed Bradley ahead by a solid seven points. If Obama should lose
today, there are those who’ll maintain it was the Bradley effect
at work.
Enough. This urban legend that holds that white voters may be
telling pollsters they’re voting for Obama while they’re secretly
harboring racial reservations about him deserves to be banished from
our political conversation. As a senior strategist and day-to-day
tactician in Deukmejian’s 1982 campaign, I’m happy to send it packing
once and for all.
There were several reasons Bradley lost the governor’s race in 1982
– and none of them had to do with race. In the last two weeks of
that campaign, Bradley was cruising through California on a languid
victory tour. Conventional wisdom and early polling had made him smug
and complacent.
Deukmejian’s campaign manager had resigned three weeks before Election
Day, and the political obituaries for the Republican candidate had
become routine.
With our backs to the wall, the Duke’s campaign regrouped. We got
a large infusion of late cash from loyal supporters and shed our
defensive posture in favor of hard-hitting messages homing in on
Bradley’s two principal vulnerabilities: non-Angeleno antipathy toward
Los Angeles and the mayor’s "soft-on-crime" liberalism.
With a little more than a week left, I drafted copy for two new
television commercials. The first built on Bradley’s opposition to
the death penalty and California’s Victims’ Bill of Rights, both of
which had been overwhelmingly approved by state voters.
A second commercial sharply exploited the wariness that other major
California cities felt toward Los Angeles, something that surveys
by our pollster, Lance Tarrance, showed to be a sure vote-getter in
San Diego, the San Francisco Bay Area and growing suburbs across
the state. Hence the tag line: "We deserve a governor for all of
California’s cities, not just one."
For rural California, there were two other central concerns. Gun
control advocates had put an initiative to freeze handgun sales –
Proposition 15 – on the ballot. The National Rifle Association and the
firearms industry raised millions of dollars and, through California
gun stores, registered 300,000 new voters, few of whom were likely
to vote for gun-control advocate Bradley.
Add that to Bradley’s unpopularity among Central Valley farmers,
and it’s easy to see why rural California flocked to the polls to
voice its opposition to his candidacy.
Finally, exit polls showing Bradley winning were skewed by
the unprecedented wave of absentee voters. In early September,
the state GOP apparatus had set in motion a campaign to promote
absentee-ballot voting – something quite common today but more
unusual a quarter-century ago. Bradley may well have won with
precinct voters. But he was swamped by overwhelmingly Republican
absentee ballots.
Analysts shouldn’t overlook an element of flawed polling that
contributed to the Election Day surprise. Tarrance continued his
tracking polls for the Deukmejian campaign right up through the eve
of Election Day. His final tracking poll showed Deukmejian within one
point of Bradley. Mervin Field, whose firm was then the state’s gold
standard of polling, took his final poll over the weekend, including
both Friday and Saturday, the two days when it’s most difficult
to reach the most valid samples of voters. Field’s timing was also
massively flawed and failed to capture Deukmejian’s surging momentum.
Lost in all the shallow analysis of that gubernatorial campaign
is what might really be called the Deukmejian effect. Less than
three weeks before Election Day, Field had released a poll analysis
showing that about 5 percent of voters were disinclined to vote for
an African-American candidate and 12 percent disinclined to vote for
a candidate of Armenian descent (which describes Deukmejian).
In the end, voters managed to sort everything out – and Deukmejian’s
ancestry and Bradley’s race may have canceled each other out. Polling
errors, absentee votes, gun rights activists, anti-L.A. sentiment and
Bradley’s liberal positions all added to his narrow defeat – by just
a little more than 1 percent of the vote – by a better-run campaign
that created driving momentum in its final days. Any notion of race
as an issue was put to bed when Bradley sought a rematch in 1986,
and Deukmejian trounced him by 23 percent – the biggest gubernatorial
landside in California in the last half of the 20th century.
As Tarrance recently wrote, the "Bradley effect" is a "theory in
search of data." If we want honest debate about the role of race in
elections, it’s time to put a stake through its heart.
Ken Khachigian, a California lawyer, was a senior aide to President
Ronald Reagan.
From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress
