The Bradley Effect

An electoral phenomenon that allegedly occurred 26 years ago in Caliornia is suddenly being held up as a reason to be skeptical about Sen. Barack Obama's widening advantage in opinion polls.
Many political pundits are saying the so-called "Bradley Effect" will ambush the first
African-American candidate for President from a major political party. For those who haven't heard about it, the Bradley Effect was blamed for Democrat Tom Bradley's
stunning loss to Republican Attorney General George Deukmejian in the 1982 gubernatorial election.
Every poll showed Bradley, the former Los Angeles mayor, well ahead of Deukmejian. In exit polls conducted throughout that election day, the majority of voters were saying they voted for Bradley. When Bradley didn't win, pollsters deduced that many white voters who had voted for Deukmejian lied about their vote because they did not want to admit that they had voted against a black man.
I was editor of the Press-Tribune, the daily newspaper in Roseville, CA in 1982 and I followed that election closely. I know why the exit polls showed Bradley winning the election. Fact is, more people voted for him than for Deukmejian that day. Simply put, Deukmejian came in second in votes cast at the polls. But Deukmejian's campaign had conducted a well-organized campaign to encourage people to vote absentee after studying past elections which showed that a large majority of absentee ballots were cast by Republicans. When the absentee ballots were counted late that night, Deukmejian had won by about 93,000 votes out of 7.6 million total votes cast.
There may have been white voters who lied to pollsters about how they voted. But the so-called Bradley Effect has been grossly over-stated. Pollsters don't like to be wrong. In rushing the blame "dishonest" voters as a way to explain the surprising outcome, they overlooked the absentee ballot strategy. Perhaps I am naive, but I do not believe the Bradley Effect is going to defeat Senator Obama. To insist that a "white lie" will decide this Presidential election outcome is, in my opinion, a careless position at best and a cynical one at worse.