Getting Out the Barack Vote: Did Race Bias Cost Obama a win in New Hampshire? by Greg Mitchell

Getting Out the Barack Vote: Did Race Bias Cost Obama A Win in New Hampshire?
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By Greg Mitchell

Published: January 11, 2008 10:40 PM ET updated Friday

NEW YORK Why were the polls so wrong in the New Hampshire primary (causing embarrassment for the press and pundits) -- and only on the Democratic side?

Many theories have been advanced in the media since Hillary Clinton’s stunning upset over Barack Obama. One of them has been much contested: that white voters told pollsters they would vote for Obama but couldn’t quite pull the trigger for the African-American candidate when the time came to cast their ballots. This allegedly counted for more than any sort of “late female surge” for Clinton.

Maybe when Bill Clinton referred to the “fairy tale” surrounding Obama he meant the fable that massive numbers of whites would actually vote for Obama when they had plausible alternatives. But this has been the elephant in the room almost totally ignored by the media until now.

Why did it show up (if it did) in New Hampshire and not in Iowa? The Iowa caucuses were quite public, this theory goes, while voters had a curtain to hide behind in New Hampshire.

An interesting new detail has now emerged seemingly bolstering that theory: not just advance polls, but some exit surveys apparently show that even coming out of the polls, voters in New Hampshire gave Obama about a 5% bulge -- if they were being honest. Where did all those votes go? Maybe he never really had them to start with.

Frank Newport, head of the Gallup organization, said that his numbers did not support the idea that huge numbers of older women turned out and were not fully accounted for in the projections. Democratic party membership is now strongly tilted toward women.

"I think it's very naive to dismiss the racial factors in this," said Larry Sabato, professor of politics at the University of Virginia.

The racial theory is far from proven, yet it was surprising to see lengthy probes of the poll debacle -- such as one by Ken Dilanian in USA Today -- that did not even mention the possibility of some sort of modest race effect.

"Anytime you've got white undecided voters pulling the lever choosing between a white and a black candidate, that is when the race issue is most important," Drew Westen of Emory University told Tom Edsall, the former Washington Post reporter now writing for Huffington Post. "Both campaigns' internal polls showed a 10 to 12 point Obama lead; to see that evaporate into a three-point loss, when he didn't have any gaffes, that has a ring to it."

Andrew Kohut of the Pew Research Center said, "The failure [of polling] on the Democratic side has to do with the fact that Clinton ran best among groups of voters who most often refuse polls -- poorer, less well-educated people. These are also the very people who are reluctant to vote for a black candidate."

And Kohut told the Associated Press: "You can't rule this out as an issue." He said the problem had not arisen in Iowa, where ''Obama was not the front-runner. He was not such a symbol, perhaps threateningly, to people who don't like blacks, that he might be president.'' He told NPR he would be drilling deeper into the results this week to see what shows up in this area.

In a New York Times op-ed on Thursday, he concludes: "In New Hampshire, the ballots are still warm, so it’s hard to pinpoint the exact cause for the primary poll flop. But given the dearth of obvious explanations, serious consideration has to be given to the difficulties that race and class present to survey methodology."

This is not a new phenomenon, of course. It is sometimes called “The Bradley Effect” or the “Wilder Effect” after two well-known black officials whose huge leads in final polls mysteriously disappeared (Mayor Tom Bradley of Los Angeles and Governor Doug Wilder of Virginia). And, of course, if true (and it may not be) it would have enormous ramifications for the rest of the primary race, and the general election if Obama did manage to get the Democratic nod.

Several commentators have pointed out, on the contrary, that actually the advance polls nailed Obama’s percentage, about 36% -- they just “underestimated” Clinton’s share. The problem with this is: the advance polls had a fair share of undecided voters. They would have had to all break for Clinton to make that idea valid.

Matt Yglesias at TheAtlantic.com put it this way, “The pollsters underestimated Clinton's level of support. People who were undecided as of the last round of polling seem to have gone overwhelmingly in her direction.” But did many, or most, do this out of reluctance to vote for an African-American?

Jacques Steinberg and Janet Elder for Thursday's New York Times try to shoot down the theory by declaring, "public opinion researchers say that is probably an artifact of a time when there were few black candidates running for elective office at any level. At any rate, there was no evidence to suggest that that was at play in New Hampshire, and there was no evidence of it in Iowa, where some earlier polls wound up being closer to the mark."

However, this ignores the fact that no black, until now, has really had a shot a being elected president -- this is hardly an "artifact" -- and that the very open caucus voting in Iowa was profoundly different than the New Hampshire way of balloting.

Others refute the anti-black bias charge by citing polls where Americans have said they are bias-free in this area -- the same sort of surveys wide open to less-than-honest responses.

MSNBC’s “First Read” political blog framed it this way: “In fact, we can only think of three races in which the public polls and the final result were SO off, and they all involved African-American candidates: Bradley's '82 gubernatorial campaign in California, Doug Wilder's surprisingly narrow '89 victory for Virginia governor, and Harvey Gantt's surprise loss for North Carolina Senate.

"There is no poll question we can find that can truly measure this phenomenon. But African-Americans are thinking this…”

Jon Stewart on The Daily Show Wednesday night told pollster James Zogby that the only thing we now know for sure coming out of New Hampshire is "Democrats lie." He wasn't referring to the racial controversy but the issue is now out there.
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