If race matters to America’s voters, the polls still can’t tell us how much

Three weeks to Election Day, and polls project a victory, possibly a big one, for Barack Obama.

Yet everywhere, anxious Democrats wring their hands. They have seen this Lucy-and-the-football routine before, and they are just waiting for their ball to be snatched away, the foiled Charlie Browns again. Remember how the exit polls in 2004 predicted President Kerry?

The anxiety is more acute this year, because Obama is the first African-American major-party presidential nominee. And even pollsters say they cannot be sure how accurately polls capture people's feelings about race, or how forthcoming Americans are in talking about a black candidate.

In recent days, nervous Obama supporters have traded worry about a survey -- widely disputed by pollsters yet voraciously consumed by the politically obsessed -- that concluded racial bias would cost Obama 6 percentage points in the final outcome. He is, of course, about 6 points ahead in current polls. See? He is going to lose.

If he does, it would not be the first time that polls have overstated support for an African-American candidate.

Since 1982, people have talked about the Bradley effect, where even last-minute polls predict a wide margin of victory, yet the black candidate goes on to lose, or win in a squeaker. (In the case that lent the phenomenon its name, Tom Bradley, the mayor of Los Angeles, lost his race for governor, the assumption being that voters lied to pollsters about their support for an African-American.)

But pollsters and political scientists say concern about a Bradley effect -- some call it a Wilder effect or a Dinkins effect, and plenty call it a theory in search of data -- is misplaced.

It obscures what they argue is the more important point: There are plenty of ways that race complicates polling.

Considered alone or in combination, these factors could produce an unforeseen Obama landslide with surprise victories in the South, a stunningly large Obama loss, or a recount-thin margin. In a year that has already turned expectations upside down, it is hard to completely reassure the fretters.

Among the non-Bradley factors at the intersection of race and polling is something called the reverse Bradley (perhaps more prevalent than the Bradley), in which polls understate support for a black candidate, particularly in regions where it is socially acceptable to express distrust of blacks. Then there are the voters not captured by polls. Research shows that those who refuse to participate in surveys tend to be less likely to vote for a black candidate. The race of the questioner, too, affects a poll -- but no one is sure whether people give more or less accurate answers when they are interviewed by someone of their own race.

"How much we are under-representing people who are intolerant and therefore unlikely to vote for Obama is an open question," said Andrew Kohut, the president of Pew Research Center. "I suspect not a great deal, but maybe some. And 'maybe some' could be crucial in a tight election."

In 1982, exit polls had Bradley so likely to win that newspaper headlines called him the victor. Yet he lost, narrowly.

There emerged what seemed like a pattern: A number of polls found more support than there actually was for Harold Washington in the 1983 Chicago mayoral race, for David N. Dinkins in the 1989 New York mayoral race, and for L. Douglas Wilder in the 1989 Virginia governor's race.

Were people so afraid to appear bigoted that they lied to pollsters, thinking it more socially acceptable to support a black candidate?

Pollsters and political scientists have long questioned that assumption, because they do not believe people have an incentive to deceive unless they are explicitly asked, "Do you support the white guy or the black guy?"

"We have no evidence that people lie to us," said Joe Lenski, executive vice president of Edison Media Research, which conducts the exit polls the television networks use.

There may be several factors at work: Michael Traugott, a University of Michigan professor who studies polling, argues that the Bradley effect was misnamed from the start; the problem with the polls in the 1982 race was not that they failed to capture latent racism but rather that they failed to account for the absentee ballots, which ultimately handed the election to the white Republican, George Deukmejian.

Whatever its causes, the Bradley gap seems to be disappearing. In a new study, Daniel J. Hopkins, a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard, considered 133 elections between 1989 and 2006 and found that blacks running for office before 1996 suffered a median Bradley effect of 3 percentage points. Blacks running after 1996, however, performed about 3 percentage points better than their polls predicted. Hopkins argues that the changes in the welfare laws in 1996 and the decline of violent crime took off the table issues that had aggravated racial animosity.

The question of how race affects polling is of course different from the question of how it affects the vote. Many experts argue that race does not play a huge role in either this year, because the economy has emerged as such a dominant issue, and Obama is not primarily identified by his race.

But most of what they know, they know from polls. And even in the least complicated years, polling is a recipe with a good dash of "Who knows?"