By the polls, it should already be over: Obama is leading McCain nationally by a ‘washout’ 6 points, and Electoral College vote tallies (EVs) suggest he’s unassailable. With 270 EVs required for victory, the two leading aggregate pollsters, RealClearPolitics and Pollster.com, both put him already over the top.
(Between ‘Solid’ and ‘Leaning’, RCP gives Obama 277 EVs to McCain’s 158. This means that even if McCain were to run the table in the remaining eight toss-up states he’d still fall short.)
Several recent major polls show Obama crossing the 50 percent threshold: something no Democratic candidate has done since Jimmy Carter, and none as late as this. White women, those ‘security moms’ who in 2004 went for Bush by 11 points over John Kerry, are currently favouring Obama by three points; and Palin is now losing female voters faster than she attracted them after the Republican National Convention.
Meanwhile, Obama’s 21-point disadvantage among white men is roughly no worse than the margin by which every Democratic presidential candidate since Lyndon Johnson has lost that demographic.
Equally telling, Obama is currently attacking McCain in red states where Democrats have long feared to tread. Meanwhile, McCain—with Palin now almost always at his side—has been campaigning exclusively in the reddest districts of states he’s visited: a desperation akin to the Titanic’s crew trying to bail its flooding bilges with buckets. A candidate still trying to excite (or incite) his base with just three weeks to go is a candidate staring at ruin.
McCain’s recent rallies have been degenerate; as one blogger put it, “less political in nature than tribal, primitive anger fests. These are festivals of hate against Obama, Democrats, liberals and the media”. The despair is palpable.
So why has no commentator yet called the election? Why has virtually every Obama supporter this columnist has quizzed—West Indian or American, white or black—responded with a painful mix of hope and dread, a misty-eyed or husky, “God, I hope so!”—as if affirming belief in an Obama victory were something that lay at the very limit of his/her courage?
The answer, of course, is ‘the Bradley effect’: the suspicion that, whatever white Americans tell the pollsters, in the privacy of the voting booth enough will vengefully cast their vote against the black man to throw the election to McCain, after all. American racism has been such a chronic obscenity in the eyes of the world (including millions of Americans) that it’s hardly conceivable that a society that has so festered morally for so long could ‘suddenly’ turn around and elect a black president.
Reports Politico: ‘A racial backlash that is not visible in today’s polls…is increasingly the subject of obsessive interest in the nonstop, not-for-attribution conversation that takes place between reporters, political analysts and campaign sources in the heat of an election. There’s the assumption that racial antagonisms are an unexploded bomb in this contest.’
One day last week on MSNBC, the prospect of ‘Bradley’ confounding the polls so traumatized Democratic activist James Carville that he began, “If Obama goes into the election with a five-point lead and loses”—and couldn’t finish the sentence.
The Bradley effect will occur, of course—no society sheds its cunning knuckle-draggers in one fell swoop. The question is on what scale. In the Democratic primaries, it appeared most virulently in New Hampshire (‘the most racist state north of Mason-Dixie,’ a white American colleague who’d lived there confided to this columnist), confounding a 17-point Obama lead in the polls—though the CW preferred to ascribe the turnaround to women’s sympathy at Hillary’s sudden tears when facing the prospect of her peremptory ejection from the race. And in states like Massachusetts and California, it was probably ‘Bradley’ that gave Clinton her bigger-than-predicted wins.
Among Hispanics, the phenomenon apparently functioned in Nevada and Texas, which, by the polls, Obama should narrowly have won but narrowly lost. But one expects this factor to be much muted this time: Mexican-Americans’ most urgent concerns (the Florida Cubans are a different matter) are the economy, health care, education and immigration; and McCain’s suspect credentials in these arenas suggest that, by and large, they’ll come home to the Democrat.
In fact, with the first generation of Cuban exiles dying off, Obama is currently almost splitting the Cuban vote in southeast Florida. He needs to make only small further gains with that demographic to clinch a state where he’s already leading—and which by itself would give him the presidency.
Elsewhere in the primaries, ‘Bradley’ was not apparent at all: in the northwest (Oregon, Washington), or the ‘white’ Midwestern states of Iowa and Wisconsin, or the Chesapeake states—as well as, surprisingly, Indiana. These were all states where Obama’s results either matched or exceeded the polls’ predictions.
The Bradley effect seems likeliest to function in the Rust Belt, in Ohio and Pennsylvania. It’s worth noting that while, in the primaries, it didn’t operate in either, something closely related to it did.
What happened was that, in both states, Obama actually overtook Clinton in the polls—until, in the very last days, the Undecideds broke heavily for Clinton, giving her each by ten points. ‘Undecided’ was clearly the self-ascription by which ‘Reagan democrats’ in these states fended off the pollsters, until the last minute.
Since they did, however, announce for Clinton before entering the voting booth, theirs wasn’t an example of ‘Bradley’.
Perhaps crucially, the percentages of Undecideds at this point are much smaller than they were in the primaries; but the polls in Ohio (where Obama leads by 4 points) and Pennsylvania (by 12) must remain suspect. Skeptical Obama supporters will be watching these states closely in the first three days of November. A sudden tightening of the polls in either at that point would not bode well for Obama in them.
But Obama is currently attacking—and leading—in so many red states—Colorado, Ohio, Florida, Virginia, North Carolina, Missouri, Nevada, Indiana, New Hampshire—that, even without blue Pennsylvania, he has all manner of different routes to 270 EVs. By contrast, McCain would need to hold all the above-mentioned states, as well as grab Pennsylvania: the Bradley effect, in other words, would have to operate powerfully in ALL of them.
But Bradley was 26 yrs ago; and the US has changed greatly since then. For the first time, young voters seem likely to come out in their numbers on election day. Most are genuinely ‘post-racial’, and most support Obama. Being largely cell phone users, they have been consistently under-represented in the polls: a fact that at least partially counters the potential of ‘Bradley’.
Additionally, Obama reportedly has the best ground game and get-out-the-vote outfit in US presidential elections’ history.
And finally—and we in the Caribbean intuitively know this—African-American turnout in this election is a tsunami about to happen.
In fact, it’s already happening. In Georgia, where early voting began last week, lines to the polling stations stretched several blocks; and eyewitnesses reported they almost wholly comprised African-Americans.
And what those startlingly precocious queues were saying, in effect, was: ‘Closet racists, bring it on! We’ll see your ‘Bradley’ and raise it with…ourselves.’
