Did NH polls miss effect of racial voting on Obama?

Did NH polls miss effect of racial voting on Obama?

by Frank James

Andrew Kohut of the Pew Research Center for The People and The Press, one of the nation's best known political polling experts, has a noteworthy opinion piece in the New York Times today that raises the discomfiting possibility that the reason pollsters got New Hampshire's results so wrong on the Democratic side was because they didn't foresee the degree to which lower income, less educated white New Hampshirites wouldn't vote for an African-American presidential candidate.

Kohut isn't saying this is for sure what happened. It's just a theory. No one yet knows what happened in New Hampshire.

But Kohut makes a fairly interesting argument that other explanations of what may have happened don't seem likely:

First, the problem was not a general failure of polling methodology. These same pollsters did a superb job on the Republican side. Senator John McCain won by 5.5 percent. The last wave of polls found a margin of 5.3 percent. So whatever the problem was, it was specific to Mrs. Clinton versus Mr. Obama.

Second, the inaccuracies don’t seem related to the subtleties of polling methods. The pollsters who overestimated Mr. Obama’s margin ranged from CBS and Gallup (who have the most rigorous voter screens and sampling designs, and have sterling records in presidential elections) to local and computerized polling operations, whose methods are a good deal less refined. Everyone got it wrong.

Third, the mistakes were not the result of a last-minute trend going Mrs. Clinton’s way. Yes, according to exit polls the 17 percent of voters who said they made their decision on Election Day chose Mrs. Clinton a little more than those who decided in the past two or three weeks. But the margin was very small — 39 percent of the late deciders went for Mrs. Clinton and 36 percent went for Mr. Obama. This gap is obviously too narrow to explain the wide lead for Mr. Obama that kept showing up in pre-election polls.

Fourth, some have argued that the unusually high turnout may have caused a problem for the pollsters. It’s possible, but unlikely. While participation was higher than in past New Hampshire primaries, the demographic and political profile of the vote remains largely unchanged. In particular, the mix of Democrats to independents — 54 percent to 44 percent respectively — is close to what it was in 2000, the most recent New Hampshire primary without an incumbent in the race.

To my mind all these factors deserve further study. But another possible explanation cannot be ignored — the longstanding pattern of pre-election polls overstating support for black candidates among white voters, particularly white voters who are poor.

Kohut suspects that low-income, lesser educated whites, who decline phone calls from pollsters at a very high rate, also are the same white voters most disinclined to vote for a black candidate.

It may have been what pollsters famously call the Bradley Effect, after one-time California politician Tom Bradley who ran as an African American to be that state's governor.

Bradley, who had been Los Angeles's popular, genial mayor, had a healthy lead in the polls, but the Democrat wound up losing in a shocker. Pollsters believe many white voters misrepresented their preferred candidate to pollsters because they didn't want to appear racist.

That phenomenon has been observed in other races. Kohut recalls seeing it in New York City in a race where he was a pollster:

Poorer, less well-educated white people refuse surveys more often than affluent, better-educated whites. Polls generally adjust their samples for this tendency. But here’s the problem: these whites who do not respond to surveys tend to have more unfavorable views of blacks than respondents who do the interviews.

I’ve experienced this myself. In 1989, as a Gallup pollster, I overestimated the support for David Dinkins in his first race for New York City mayor against Rudolph Giuliani; Mr. Dinkins was elected, but with a two percentage point margin of victory, not the 15 I had predicted. I concluded, eventually, that I got it wrong not so much because respondents were lying to our interviewers but because poorer, less well-educated voters were less likely to agree to answer our questions. That was a decisive factor in my miscall.

Kohut's view has support. Tom Edsall has a Huffington Post piece that quotes Kohut and others on this issue.

This is from Edsall's piece:

"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," notes Drew Westen of Emory University. "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…"

Obama has done exponentially better than the three African Americans who sought the presidential nomination before him: Shirley Chisholm, Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton. Nonetheless, at the moment race remains the most salient of factors.

Few Democratic politicians, especially Clinton, would publicly cite Obama's race as a liability. But in brutal political terms, this unstated vulnerability may be used to persuade leaders of the party establishment and fundraising network to stick with Clinton through what is now sure to be a bruising fight until at least February 5, and perhaps all the way to the convention in August.

Again, there are those who disagree with the Bradley Effect thesis. One would be Frank Newport, editor and chief of the Gallup Poll. On his Gallup Guru blog on the USA Today website, he wrote this:

Some have also argued that white voters in New Hampshire told pollsters they were going to vote for a black candidate (Obama) but when actually in the voting booth ended up not wanting to do so. This hypothesis has been evoked over the years in elections with black candidates, but has been difficult to prove. Discrepancies between pre-election polls and the actual vote for black candidates, in fact, are certainly not the norm. This year, as an example, the pre-election polls in Iowa were very accurate in relationship to Obama's actual vote in the caucuses

But Kohut has a response to this:

Why didn’t this problem come up in Iowa? My guess is that Mr. Obama may have posed less of a threat to white voters in Iowa because he wasn’t yet the front-runner. Caucuses are also plainly different from primaries.

Future primaries will give us a chance to see if this trend continues, with polls overestimating Obama's support and low-income, less educated whites breaking largely for Clinton or Edwards.

If it does, it would mean that Obama might have difficulty winning a key constituency within the Democratic Party. And it would raise questions as to whether such voters would vote for Obama if he became the nominee, cross party lines to vote for the Republican nominee (as in Harold Washington's landmark 1983 race to become Chicago mayor) or stay home.

Posted by Frank James on January 10, 2008 11:41 AM | Permalink