Bradley effect
[12] Bradley himself was unpopular at the state level for a variety of reasons, and went on to lose the 1986 California gubernatorial election to Deukmejian by more than 22 percentage points before settling a longstanding federal corruption probe into his alleged involvement with several multi-million-dollar illegal schemes Los Angeles.
[14] In 1991, Bradley would infamously describe the Justice Department's decision not to indict him, after he repaid a portion of illegally transferred funds at issue in the probe, as a "Christmas gift.
[23] Similar voter behavior was noted in the 1989 race for Governor of Virginia between Democrat L. Douglas Wilder, an African-American, and Republican Marshall Coleman, who was white.
A few analysts, such as political commentator and The Weekly Standard editor Fred Barnes, attributed the four-point loss by Indian American candidate Bobby Jindal in the 2003 Louisiana gubernatorial runoff election to the Bradley effect.
[38] Others, such as National Review contributor Rod Dreher, countered that later polls taken just before the election correctly showed that lead to have evaporated, and reported the candidates to be statistically tied.
[39][40] In 2007, Jindal ran again, this time securing an easy victory, with his final vote total[41] remaining in line with or stronger than the predictions of the polls conducted shortly before the election.
[42] In 2006, there was speculation that the Bradley effect might appear in the Tennessee race for United States Senator between Harold Ford, Jr. and white candidate Bob Corker.
[23] In the race for United States Senator from Maryland, black Republican candidate Michael Steele lost by a wider margin than predicted by late polls.
[23] The overall accuracy of the polling data from the 2006 elections was cited, both by those who argue that the Bradley effect has diminished in American politics,[23][45][47] and those who doubt its existence in the first place.
In the initial hours after voting concluded in the Bradley-Deukmejian race in 1982, similarly inaccurate exit polls led some news organizations to project Bradley to have won.
[45][55] During the 1988 Jackson presidential campaign, Murray Edelman, a veteran election poll analyst for news organizations and a former president of the American Association for Public Opinion Research, found the race of the pollster conducting the interview to be a factor in the discrepancy.
Brodnitz suggested that late-deciding voters tend to have moderate-to-conservative political opinions and that this may account in part for last-minute decision-makers breaking largely away from black candidates, who have generally been more liberal than their white opponents in the elections in question.
[60] Prominent Republican pollster V. Lance Tarrance, Jr. flatly denies that the Bradley effect occurred during that election, echoing the absentee ballot factor cited by DiCamillo.
The study concluded finally that the Bradley effect was a real phenomenon, amounting to a median gap of 3.1 percentage points before 1996, but that it was likely not the sole factor in those discrepancies, and further that it had ceased to manifest itself at all by 1996.
It asserted that the timing of the disappearance of the Bradley effect coincided with that of a decrease in such rhetoric in American politics over such potentially racially charged issues as crime and welfare.
The study found no evidence of a corresponding effect based upon gender—in fact, female Senate candidates received on average 1.2 percentage points more votes than polls had predicted.
[5][24][46][70][71] After a victorious showing in the Iowa caucuses, where votes were cast publicly, polls predicted that Obama would also capture the New Hampshire Democratic primary election by a large margin over Hillary Clinton, a white senator.
However, Clinton defeated Obama by three points in the New Hampshire race, where ballots were cast secretly, immediately initiating suggestions by some analysts that the Bradley effect may have been at work.
[74] After the Super Tuesday primaries of February 5, 2008, political science researchers from the University of Washington found trends suggesting the possibility that with regard to Obama, the effect's presence or absence may be dependent on the percentage of the electorate that is black.
[77] Alternatively, Douglas Wilder has suggested that a 'reverse Bradley effect' may be possible because some Republicans may not openly say they will vote for a black candidate, but may do so on election day.
[78] The "Fishtown Effect" is a scenario where prejudiced or racist white voters cast their vote for a black candidate solely on economic concerns.
[81] Alternatively, writer Alisa Valdes-Rodriguez suggested another plausible factor is something called the "Huxtable effect", where the positive image of the respectable African American character Cliff Huxtable, a respected middle-class obstetrician and father on the 1980s television series The Cosby Show, made young voters who grew up with that series' initial run comfortable with the idea of an African American man being a viable presidential candidate, which enhanced Obama's election chances with that population.
Following the 2008 presidential election, a number of news sources reported that the result confirmed the absence of a 'Bradley Effect' in view of the close correlation between the pre-election polls and the actual share of the popular vote.
For instance, it has been suggested that an extant Bradley Effect was masked by the unusually high turnout amongst African Americans and other Democratic leaning voter groups under the unique circumstances of the 2008 election (i.e. the first serious bid for President by an African-American candidate).
Nevertheless, Trump won the key Rust Belt states of Ohio, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, giving him more electoral votes than Secretary Clinton.
Post-election analysis of public opinion polling showed that Trump's base was larger than predicted, leading some experts to suggest that some "shy Trumpers" were hiding their preferences to avoid being seen as prejudiced by pollsters.
This finding led Morning Consult's chief research officer to conclude that there was little evidence that poll respondents were feeling pressured to downplay their true general election preferences.
[92] The Bradley effect—as well a variant of the so-called shy Tory factor that involves prospective voters' expressed intentions to vote for candidates belonging to the U.S. Republican Party—reportedly skewed a number of opinion polls running up to the 2018 U.S.
[93] Notably, the effect was arguably present in the Florida gubernatorial election between black Democrat Andrew Gillum, the mayor of Tallahassee, and white Republican Ron DeSantis, a U.S.
