Bradley Effect Myth Persists

[I spent the winter writing songs about getting better]

This is a long-running thing on this forum. For those that aren't aware of the main issue at hand, J. J. is not psychologically capable of admitting that he's wrong.

Obvious to any long time poster. The problem though is that he has a way of wording his posts of distortions, falsehoods and half-truths (more like quarter-truths really) in a competent sounding way, meaning some casual observers might be drawn in (sort of the thing TJ touched on.) Hence why I still make sure to debunk them. Even in this thread we saw someone take his word for it that Obama consistently underpolled in states with large Hispanic populations.

[SPC]

Actually nothing all that odd happened. J. J. is as usual cherry-picking results and doing it badly. In New Mexico (which is always notoriously difficult to poll), the polls had an average of him with 55%, and he got a little under 57%. In Arizona Obama got a little under 45%, and the last polling average had him at 46% (and of course why undecideds might break for McCain in Arizona is a little obvious). Nevada's the only one where the polls were off by a significant margin, where Obama averaged 50% and he got over 55%. However the last poll average also showed 6% undecided, and with the swing Nevada took and the economic conditions of the state it's not too hard to simply seeing the undecideds breaking heavily, and with the dynamics of the state using a turnout model based off 2004 in 2008 would be somewhat inaccurate. I'm oversimplifying quite a bit obviously, but these are far more logical explanations than "The Bradley Effect causes black candidates to underpoll in states with lots of Hispanics."

Also look at Texas where Obama polled at 41% with 5% undecided and got 43.6% (aka the undecideds broke almost 50/50) and California where he polled at 59% and got a little under 61% (with 3% undecided.) So this "inverse Bradley Effect" thing with Hispanics basically requires the same total random occurrence to be believed in.

Do you attribute Reid and Bennet overperforming their polls to a similar sweeping of the undecided vote? In any case, Reid and Bennet aren't black.

[I spent the winter writing songs about getting better]

Actually nothing all that odd happened. J. J. is as usual cherry-picking results and doing it badly. In New Mexico (which is always notoriously difficult to poll), the polls had an average of him with 55%, and he got a little under 57%. In Arizona Obama got a little under 45%, and the last polling average had him at 46% (and of course why undecideds might break for McCain in Arizona is a little obvious). Nevada's the only one where the polls were off by a significant margin, where Obama averaged 50% and he got over 55%. However the last poll average also showed 6% undecided, and with the swing Nevada took and the economic conditions of the state it's not too hard to simply seeing the undecideds breaking heavily, and with the dynamics of the state using a turnout model based off 2004 in 2008 would be somewhat inaccurate. I'm oversimplifying quite a bit obviously, but these are far more logical explanations than "The Bradley Effect causes black candidates to underpoll in states with lots of Hispanics."

Also look at Texas where Obama polled at 41% with 5% undecided and got 43.6% (aka the undecideds broke almost 50/50) and California where he polled at 59% and got a little under 61% (with 3% undecided.) So this "inverse Bradley Effect" thing with Hispanics basically requires the same total random occurrence to be believed in.

Do you attribute Reid and Bennet overperforming their polls to a similar sweeping of the undecided vote? In any case, Reid and Bennet aren't black.

It's possible, or that the pollsters messed up the turnout there (actually Reid's a great example being in Nevada as well.) But yeah it shows that polls can be off for both black and non-black candidates, and the same factors that make them off for non-blacks can also apply for black candidates. J. J.'s biggest fallacy is simply defaulting to using the Bradley Effect to explain all polling discrepancies when a black candidate is involved.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

Obvious to any long time poster.

But not to any newcomers... well... maybe not to all of them. It's a sort of guide post or something.

[J. J.]

Of course the results remained the same as in the pre-election polls, because more Blacks compensated the loss of Whites.

This was the point I was trying to make. That there may have been unexpected voters compensating for other "lost" voters - hiding the presence of a possible Bradley effect.

A fairly good paper on it is here:  http://people.iq.harvard.edu/~dhopkins/wilder13.pdf

I do disagree with Hopkins that there is an over-reporting effect of the front runner in Patrick's case.  However, I do agree that it was declining prior to 2008.

I think there are some masking factors:

1.  Disproportional turnout.  You expect group X to represent 10% of the vote cast and it's 13%.  Was Gallup so far off because its model expected a 8% Black turnout and it was actually 10%?

2.  There are not a lot of good polls in some of the states.  Did Obama overpoll with whites in AL or NY?  We don't know because we don't have a large number of good polls from AL or NY just before the election.  Did Obama overpoll with Hispanics in CA or TX?  We don't know for the same reason.

I would be looking to see if Obama underpolls with Hispanics of Mexican ancestry more than I would to see if Obama overpolls in general.