It’s Obama!
Strangest thing. A pointy-headed post-doc at Harvard studies the so-called Wilder Effect … when black candidates significantly poll better than they perform at the polls, due to lying poll subjects, named for Virginia Gov. Douglas Wilder’s experience in 1989. Harvard post-doc studies all elections of blacks and women for gubernatorial or senate office since then. Determines that the Wilder Effect appears to focus on races where particularly race-charged issues are at play. And determines that the Wilder Effect has disappeared since 1996. But it get interesting, given the focus lately on bigotry vs. Obama, when the post-doc looks at all of Obama’s primary elections, and associated polling. Here, I’ll let Harvard University Post-Doctoral Fellow Daniel J. Hopkins tell you himself:
The 2008 Democratic presidential primaries renewed speculation about the Wilder effect, so as a final test, we applied the same decision rules as above to collect up to three polls for each of the 33 U.S. states that held contested Democratic primaries. Doing so yields 87 observations of polled and actual support for Senators Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton. The mean polling-performance gap was 1.4 percentage points for Senator Clinton, and the reverse for Senator Obama. This estimated mean is not at all sensitive to particular polls or states: if we remove the observations for ve randomly chosen states at a time, we still observe that Senator Obama’s election-day performance was better than his polling on average in every one of the 10,000 simulations. This is yet more evidence that the Wilder effect, strong in the early 1990s, is strong no longer.
Interesting. Apparently when you look at actual facts as opposed to playing games with photos of black people and words like “violence,” you get a different result. Turns out closet bigotry is a thing of the past. In fact, if Obama does better than he polls, then you can throw my theory about closet non-racists out the window. Given that the two candidates have been at a virtual dead heat, I guess that means it’s Obama. The doddering old white guy and his hot backwoods sidekick are the underdogs. Which will make it a big surprise for everyone when they win. You can call that the McCain-Palin Effect.
Posted by Jules Crittenden at 10:58 pm Comments (0) on Saturday, September 20, 2008
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