Today's Polls, 7/1

Tom Schaller argues in the New York Times that Barack Obama should abandon the South, or at least the South outside of Florida and Virginia. I don't agree with the entirety of Schaller's reasoning. In particular, while I see the same inverse correlation that Schaller does -- the greater the number of black voters in a Southern state, the fewer white voters tend to vote for the Democrat -- I don't necessarily see a causation. Our regression model seems to do a pretty good job of explaining the Southern vote without any reference to some sort of racial interaction effects, by focusing instead on things like the number of white evangelicals in the state and income levels.

Nevertheless, I do tend to agree with Schaller's conclusion: the South (again excluding Florida and Virginia) is fairly likely to disappoint the Democrats again. We have a number of polls today to back that up.



Let's focus first on the results in Georgia, Louisiana and North Carolina. Obama did get a bounce from Strategic Vision's last poll of Georgia, where he had previously trailed by 14 points. But he remains 8 points behind, and while Bob Barr is pulling 3 percent of the vote away from McCain in Georgia, it doesn't appear to me that Barr will have the resources to improve that number significantly. In North Carolina, Obama has been stuck at 3-5 points behind John McCain for quite a long time; the PPP poll today confirms that conclusion. And in Louisiana, Southern Media & Opinion Research has Obama 16 points behind, just as it did in April.

It seems to me that Obama's numbers in states like North Carolina and Georgia are liable to come in within a relatively narrow range. He'll do better than a Democrat like John Kerry did there, with substantial support from blacks (although Schaller is right that African-American turnout has not been particularly low), students, information-sector workers, and new migrants to the region -- as PPP notes, Obama is leading by 6 points among people who have moved to North Carolina from outside the state, but trails by 13 among people who were born and raised there. But where Obama is disliked in the South, he tends to be disliked a lot; his "very unfavorables" tend to be pretty high in the region. There just aren't that many swing voters in the South, and the Democrats are left watching the paint dry and the demographics gradually become more favorable to them in states like North Carolina and Georgia. North Carolina could be 2012's Virginia, and Georgia could be 2016's, but it's probably too soon for a non-Southern Democrat to be winning states in the interior of the region.

Florida, however, remains its own demographic entity, and there an Obama win is more plausible. PPP has him leading by 2 there -- a big move upward from their only previous poll of the state, which had Obama 11 points behind in March -- although Strategic Vision has him trailing by 6. The fact is that Florida remains something like Obama's Plan C or Plan D for winning the election, but any state with 27 electoral votes and where the polling appears to be this volatile will need to be closely monitored.

And once we move entirely outside of the South, Obama appears to be doing quite well. SurveyUSA now has him 20 points ahead in New York -- up from 10 points before -- and he's holding onto a 5-point advantage in both major national tracking polls. From everything we can tell, Obama's post-primary bounce has plateaued, but not peaked, though it does appear to be concentrated in particular regions, some of which (like the Rust Belt states of Ohio and Michigan) have been quite helpful to Obama, and others of which (like New York and California) are fairly superfluous.

Finally, one quick methodological aside: the Strategic Vision polls were "leaked" today by Political Wire with a limited number of details. I have filled in my guesstimates of survey dates and sample sizes based on their typical patterns, but we will correct those tomorrow as needed.

There's More...

Contract Post

The Reverse Bradley Effect: Fact or Fiction?

Over at The Stump, Noam Scheiber tracked down a Pew Research study that purports to identify the presence of both a Bradley Effect and a Reverse Bradley Effect in the results to date in the Democratic primaries. For those of you who are not familiar with the Bradley Effect, the long and short of it is the idea that black candidates tend to systematically underperform their polls on election day, perhaps because people lie to interviewers in surveys so as to be politically correct. The Reverse Bradley Effect would be -- well, just the reverse -- a black candidate systematically overperforming his poll numbers for some or another reason.

The gist of the Pew study can be found in the chart below (larger version here), which looks at the extent to which Barack Obama overperformed or underperformed his polls in a number of primary states, and compares that to the African-American population in the state. The authors report that Obama has outperformed his polls in states with high African-American populations, and underperformed them in states with low ones. They find a correlation of .74, which is quite high -- it would imply that more than half of the state-by-state polling errors are explained by the racial composition of that state alone.


I have a couple of issues with the way this study was conducted. Actually, just one issue, but it's a pretty big one. The authors seem to have cherry-picked their states. They exclude states like Connecticut, Maryland, and New York that had closed primaries, but give no explanation as to why. They do not include Vermont, even though it appears to have met their standard of having three polls conducted in the week before the election. They don't include Florida which, officially-sanctioned primary or no, would seem to be as useful as any other data point insofar as the Bradley Effect goes. They don't include the caucus states of Iowa and Nevada (there is actually a decent argument for that, since caucuses are conducted in public rather than the privacy of a voting booth, but I would tend to be inclusive rather than exclusive when testing my own hypothesis). They do include the "outlier" of Wisconsin, but seem to be annoyed by it -- as though it's Wisconsin's fault for not conforming to their hypothesis.

So, I attempted to recreate their analysis, pulling my own numbers from Pollster.com, and adding back in the blacklisted states. My imitation of their graph is below:



Putting these other states back in turns out not to make all that much difference; the correlation drops from .74 to .62. Still, we notice the presence of a few more states, like Vermont and Iowa, that don't seem to fit the hypothesis.

You'll notice I've done something else too, which is to color code the graph. The states in blue are those that we define as Southern (this includes Florida and Virginia, but not Maryland or Missouri), whereas those in red are the rest of the country. The claim for the Reverse Bradley Effect is really just based on the strong pull exerted by five states: Virginia, Alabama, South Carolina, Georgia, and Mississippi. All those states have high black populations, but they also have another thing in common, which is that they are all Southern.

But what if we look at other states that have relatively high black populations, but are not in the South? New York and Illinois have fairly substantial black populations -- but the polls were spot-on in each of those locations. In Maryland -- which I consider a Northern state, and which demographically has much more in common with other Northern states than anything in the South -- Obama outperformed his polls, but only barely so. New Jersey has a relatively large black population and Obama slightly underperformed his polls there.

So instead of drawing one regression line, let's draw two: one to represent the South and the other to represent the rest of the country.



Well, it looks like we are dealing with two completely different sets of behaviors. The relationship in the South is quite strong -- just as strong as the Pew authors found originally. But there is virtually no relationship between race and Obama's performance at the ballot booth elsewhere in the country -- the slight correlation you see is nowhere near statistically significant. The polls overestimated Obama's performance in New Hampshire and Massachusetts -- but underestimated it in Vermont and Wisconsin. They were largely accurate in states like New York and Maryland that have substantial black populations. There is just nothing happening with the Bradley Effect outside of the South, at least so far as this data can tell us.

Also of note: my study identifies the presence of a Reverse Bradley Effect in the South (Obama outperforming his polls in states with higher percentages of black voters), but not the presence of the plain ol' Bradley Effect in either the North or the South. At no point do my regression lines for either region run substantially above zero, which is the point at which Obama would begin to underperform his polls.

Put differently: there is nowhere in the country where we have reason to subtract from Obama's poll numbers based on the Bradley Effect. (Yes, Obama has underperformed his polls in some "white" states -- but he has overperformed them in others that are whiter than Kurt Rambis). On the other hand, there is one specific group of states where we might want to add to Obama's polls based on the Reverse Bradley Effect, which are Southern states with high African-American populations.

If the Reverse Bradley Effect is real, what is its raison d'être? There is a fair amount of academic literature on the effects of the race of the interviewer on survey results. People can guess quite accurately the race of the person on the other end of the line, and they might respond differently depending on that perception. It is probably safe to assume that the majority of interviewers are white, and correctly perceived as white. A white voter might not want to tell a (presumably) white interviewer that they're voting for the black guy. Or, a black voter might feel intimidated by a (presumably) white interviewer, and not want to tell him they're voting for the black guy. These effects may be far more tangible in the South, in which race is a much more explicit consideration in everyday life. Three other quick comments on this:

1. If I had to guess, I would guess that black voters might be more likely not to want to reveal their true candidate choice than white voters. This is because I have noticed that a lot of black voters tend to be classified as 'undecided' in pre-primary surveys, which might indicate the hedging of bets.

2. As Scheiber and others have noted, there appears to be less of a Reverse Bradley Effect in polls conducted by agencies like Rasmussen, Survey USA and PPP that use automated calling scripts (robopolls). This requires further research -- but if true it would tend to validate my hypothesis.

3. Something else that is worth mentioning: Americans tend to think that other people have more racial hangups than they claim to have themselves. This might be why there is a Reverse Bradley Effect, rather than a Bradley Effect. You don't think you're a racist -- but you think the person on the other end of the line might be, and so you lie about your candidate choice so as not to offend them.

With all that having been said, I may be overselling the Reverse Bradley Effect. What we know is that in Southern states with large black populations, Obama has outperformed his polls by a statistically significant margin. But we're just guessing at why this is the case. It could be because the pollster's turnout models are screwed up. It could be because minority voters are more likely to use cellphones as their primary line, and therefore won't make it into surveys. It could be because of something I call the Frontrunner Effect, which is that there is some tendency for candidates who are already ahead in the polls to run up the score on election day.

Nor do we know if we have identified a universal effect, or whether it's something specific to Obama and Clinton. Perhaps Southern voters feel badly voting against Hillary Clinton, who claims some heritage in the region. But the same might not be true when Obama is matched against John McCain, whom Southerners tend to feel lukewarm about. Or, it could be that there is a Reverse Bradley Effect among Democrats but a real Bradley Effect among Republicans, and the two things will cancel one another out in the general election. If you had to bet against the spread, however, you might want to take the over on Obama's numbers in states like North Carolina and Virginia.

There's More...

Contract Post

Today's Polls, 3/22

Just one poll today -- and we're on the road -- so we'll be brief. The poll is out of Arkansas, where Rasmussen reports that John McCain is leading Hillary Clinton by 7 points and Barack Obama by 29 points in Arkansas.

This is one of those polls that, although the losing margin is much uglier for Obama, is actually worse news for Hillary because Arkansas is a state that she was expecting to win, whereas Obama has always polled badly there. Why Obama has polled so badly in Arkansas is an open question: the Arkansas is actually fairly reliably Democratic at the state level, and a plurality of the state's voters (41%) described their party ID as Democrat in 2004 exit polling. And for Clinton, there's an open question about whether something is happening to her numbers in the South: this is the second straight poll that has come in much below expectations for her in the region, following yesterday's Rasmussen poll of Georgia.

There's More...

Contract Post

The Clinton voters who won't vote for Obama

From the recent Rasmussen Reports primary poll in Mississippi:

One measure of a deepening divide in the party is that just 56% of Obama voters have a favorable opinion of Clinton. Just 34% of Clinton voters have a favorable opinion of Obama.

If Obama is nominated, just 47% of Clinton voters say they are even somewhat likely to vote for Obama in the general election against John McCain.

If Clinton is nominated, 65% of Obama voters say they are at least somewhat likely to vote for her against McCain.

So among Clinton supporters in Mississippi, only about half are "even somewhat likely" to vote for Obama in November.

Sure, the Democratic primary has been acrimonious of late. But there's something more going on here. Who are these folks that would vote for Clinton in the primary -- but McCain in the general election? They are likely white Southern Baptists (and probably leftover Solid South Democrats), a group which, as I've been emphasizing all year, is not kindly disposed toward Barack Obama. I suspect the reason ultimately might have to do with Obama's race, but that's a subject for another day.

Now, how much of a problem is this for Obama? Probably not all that much. If we look at this subgroup in Mississippi, for instance, we're talking about half of the 40% of Clinton supporters in a state in which Democrats won about 40% of the vote in 2004. So 50% x 40% x 40% = about 8% of the voting pool.

But these voters are concentrated in states where Obama is not likely to be competitive anyway -- the states that we're referring to as the Deep South. In states that are even moderately more liberal -- states like North Carolina and Virginia in the South Coast region -- Obama's advantages with black voters and independents are enough for him to run at least evenly with Clinton. But in places like Mississippi, Tennessee, and Oklahoma, Obama has very little chance.

There's More...

Contract Post