Racial Controversy in the New Hampshire Polling Disaster

Andrew Kohut of the Pew polling organization claimed in an essay this week that lower-income whites declined to vote for Barack Obama in last Tuesday's New Hampshire primary on the basis of race.

It's an old hypothesis, often called the "Bradley Effect," a reference to Los Angeles Mayor Tom Bradley's loss in the 1982 California gubernatorial election.

John Judis hammers Kohut in a piece over at The New Republic (via Memeorandum):

Kohut is the eminence grise among pollsters. His interpretation [of the New Hampshire fiasco] was published in The New York Times. Suffice it to say, it carried a lot of weight. Kohut's argument goes as follows: Clinton did much better in the final count than Obama among poorer, less educated voters. These voters "have more unfavorable views of blacks" than wealthier, more educated voters. Kohut doesn't accuse these voters of lying. Instead, he argues that the voters who have unfavorable views of blacks tend to be underrepresented in polling samples, because they "do not respond" to pollsters--thus accounting for the inaccurate readings of support for Clinton and Obama.

This is an incendiary argument. Not only does it purport to explain why the pollsters got the results wrong, but it also implies that Clinton's success in New Hampshire can largely be attributed to the racism of low-income, less educated whites. But Kohut's evidence seems flimsy at best.

Kohut provides no data--none at all--to back up his contention that New Hampshire's lower-income, less educated whites have a more unfavorable view of blacks than their wealthier, more educated counterparts. I think he is simply inferring from national studies or studies that were conducted elsewhere, but he doesn't say. Yet New Hampshire is not Georgia or Mississippi, states with long histories of racial problems, nor is it the polarized New York City of 1989, where Kohut claims he encountered the Bradley effect. This kind of explosive claim deserves to have been backed up by some kind of evidence. I certainly don't know of any.

Judis provides his own data, from the University of New Hampshire Survey Center, indicating no election-day decline in Obama voting among among those at lower levels of education. He concludes his analysis by suggesting that a gender-based analysis - why did women switch to Hillary? - is likely to provide the most compelling explanation for New Hampshire's muddled polling results:

Some of the polls seem to have significantly underrepresented the women's vote....

That may not be the reason why other polls got the result so wrong, but the under-representation of woman voters, coupled with the volatility of the electorate (as evidenced by the last minute shift of college-educated women voters), is a far more plausible hypothesis than the one that Kohut, Sullivan, and Robinson provide. This is not to say that there weren't people who did not vote for Obama because he is black. But, clearly, a hidden racist vote is neither an explanation for Clinton's victory nor the pollsters' error in predicting it. A closer reading of the evidence also has the benefit of not accusing half of New Hampshire Democratic primary voters of being racists.

The thesis of persistent racism in America is a staple of left-wing political discourse. Here's more on the debate from John Perazzo at FrontPageMagazine:

In the worldview of the American left, there is no article of faith more central than the notion that the United States is today -- and always has been -- infested with racism in every avenue of private and public life. This racism, we are told, makes its influence felt with particular force in the realm of politics, where the left’s conventional wisdom says that African Americans have no hope of ever garnering enough white support to ascend the political ladder to its highest rungs. This of course raises the issue of Democratic presidential hopeful Barack Obama, who trounced Hillary Clinton in the January 3rd Caucus in Iowa (where the population is 95 percent white), and was defeated only narrowly by Mrs. Clinton five days later in New Hampshire (where the population is 96 percent white). How can Obama’s strong showings in these races, whose purpose is to determine who ultimately will run for the highest elected office in the nation, be reconciled with the leftist paradigm?

Perazzo's piece is excellent, and includes a nice set of references to the outstanding literature in the debate. I especially like this part:

Academia is replete with eminent professors who...view the United States as a nation that is bigoted to its core. Consider University of Pennsylvania professor Michael Eric Dyson, who laments the “miserable plight of black men in America,” and who recently expressed his hope that the “psychic, internal emotional turmoil that black people struggle against will somehow be lessened by seeing the image of a black man [Barack Obama] in charge” of the executive branch of the U.S. government.

Read the rest.

I discussed the issue in a recent post, "Barack Obama: The Hope of Black America?" But see also my post on Lawyers, Guns & Money, where the view that the U.S. "is bigoted to its core" gets a lot of play.