(white) Americans more willing to vote for black candidate, less likely to lie about it
Can You Trust What Polls Say about Obama’s Electoral Prospects?
Two Important Trends Suggest Americans May Now Be Ready to Elect an
African American President
by Scott Keeter and Nilanthi Samaranayake February 7, 2007
The strong showing of Democrat Barack Obama in early trial heat polls
for the 2008 presidential election raises anew the question of
whether the American public is ready to support an African American
candidate for president. Recent polling points to two significant
shifts on this question.
The first is that an ever larger majority of the public indeed says
that they are willing to vote for an African American for the
nation’s highest office. The second is that polls conducted in
campaigns pitting white and black candidates against each other are
doing a better job of accurately predicting the outcome of the
election now than in the past, suggesting that hidden biases that
confounded polling in biracial elections in the 1980s and early 1990s
are no longer a serious problem.
With Obama poised to declare his candidacy for president this
weekend, recent national polling finds that although he trails
Hillary Clinton for the Democratic nomination, he does nearly as well
as Clinton in general election matchups against the frontrunning
Republicans, narrowly leading John McCain and running roughly even
with Rudy Giuliani.
More generally, the vast majority of Americans tell pollsters that
they are willing to vote for a qualified African American candidate
for president. In a Newsweek poll conducted last year, just 3% said
they would not do so. This was not always the case. Gallup has asked
a version of this question since 1958. Most recently, in 2003, 92%
said they would vote for a black candidate for president while just
6% said they would not. But in 1958, a majority of 53% said they
would not vote for a black candidate; even as recently as 1984, 16%
told Gallup they would not do so.
Can polls that show the public willing to vote for a black candidate
be taken at face value? It is undoubtedly true that racial attitudes
in the U.S. have become more tolerant over the past five decades, and
African American candidates have won high office in many states. But
it is also true that the expression of racist attitudes is less
socially acceptable now than in the past. This may lead some people
to tell pollsters that they are more tolerant than they actually are.
Election Polls in the 1980s and 1990s Missed the Mark in Biracial
Elections
Problems with pre-election polls in several high-profile biracial
elections in the 1980s and early 1990s raised the question of whether
covert racism remained an impediment to black candidates. White
candidates in most of these races generally did better on Election
Day than they were doing in the polls, while their black opponents
tended to end up with about the same level of support as the polls
indicated they had.
This phenomenon was first noticed in the 1982 race for governor of
California, where Los Angeles Mayor Tom Bradley, a black Democrat,
narrowly lost to Republican George Deukmejian, despite polls showing
him with a lead ranging from 9 to 22 points. The next year, African
American Democrat Harold Washington barely won his race for mayor of
Chicago against Republican Bernard Epton. Pre-election polls taken
within the last two weeks of the campaign showed Washington with a 14-
point lead.
Three highly visible races in 1989 and 1990 also followed this
pattern, though in two instances at least one late poll signaled a
close race. Virginia Democrat and African American Douglas Wilder
edged white Republican Marshall Coleman by less than one percentage
point to become the nation’s first elected black governor. But two of
three polls conducted just days before the election showed Wilder
leading by double-digits; a third poll had him 4 points ahead.
Even an exit poll conducted on Election Day showed Wilder winning by
10 points, while accurately tallying the vote in the other two
statewide races. Unlike most exit polls that use an anonymous written
ballot to collect voters’ responses, this one had interviewers asking
voters face-to-face how they voted, a situation that might increase
the pressure to provide a socially desirable response.
Also in 1989, Democrat David Dinkins, an African American, won
victory over Republican Rudy Giuliani in the race for mayor of New
York by a slight two points, despite leading by 18 points in a poll
conducted by the New York Observer a week before the election.
In the following year, another prominent election featured African
American Democrat Harvey Gantt in a bitter race against Republican
Sen. Jesse Helms of North Carolina. Two of three independent polls
conducted just before the election showed Gantt leading Helms, but
Helms prevailed by six percentage points on Election Day. Race was an
issue in the campaign as evidenced by a Helms campaign television
advertisement featuring a fictional white job seeker who lost out to
a minority candidate because of a racial quota. The ad charged that
Gantt supported hiring quotas.
In 1992, black Democrat Carol Moseley Braun won a 10-point victory
over Republican Richard Williamson in a race for a U.S. Senate seat
from Illinois. But polls taken just days before the election showed
her with a lead ranging from 17 to 20 points. Interestingly, in the
Democratic primary, Moseley Braun trailed incumbent Sen. Alan Dixon
by a wide margin in two polls taken just a week before she won the
election.
2006 Polls More Accurate
Last year’s midterm elections featured several important races that
pitted black and white candidates against each other. Unlike the
experience of the 1980s and 1990s, pre-election polls in most of
these campaigns performed well, and there was little evidence of a
“hidden” vote for the white candidate.
Although African American candidates lost four of the five statewide
races that featured black vs. white candidates, the late pre-election
polling tended to mirror the final outcome.1 Black Republican
candidates for governor lost by wide margins in Ohio (by 23 points)
and Pennsylvania (20 points), but the average of the final
independent polls in each state showed similar margins (21 and 23
points, respectively). An African American Democrat, Deval Patrick,
won the Massachusetts governor’s race by a landslide (56% to 35%)
over a white Republican Kerry Healey. Two pre-election polls slightly
underestimated Healey’s support, but these were conducted about two
weeks before the election.
Black candidates also lost in two key Senate races — Maryland and
Tennessee — but there was no clear evidence of a hidden vote for the
white candidate in either state. The more complicated case was in
Maryland, where Republican Lt. Gov. Michael Steele, who is African
American, lost his Senate bid to Democrat Benjamin Cardin by 10
points, about the same margin as in a Washington Post poll conducted
10 days before the election. Two other polls, however, showed the
race to be much closer. But these polls also underestimated the
Democratic vote in the race for governor in which both the Democrat
and Republican candidates were white. Both polls showed the two
candidates running neck-and-neck, but on Election Day the Democrat,
Baltimore Mayor Martin O’Malley, beat incumbent Republican Gov.
Robert Ehrlich by seven points.
The race for the U.S. Senate in Tennessee was perhaps the most
closely watched of all the biracial elections last year. Black
Democrat Harold Ford, Jr. narrowly lost to white Republican Bob
Corker, 51% to 48%. There were many pre-election polls in this race,
and three of the final four polls actually overstated Corker’s lead.
Taken together, the accuracy of the polling in these five biracial
elections suggests that the problems that bedeviled polling in the
1980s and early 1990s may no longer be so serious. This change is not
a result of broader improvements in the methodology of election
polling; most election polls in the earlier period were competently
done and generally performed well in predicting election outcomes.
The experience of the 2006 elections indicates that racism may be
less of a factor in public judgments about African American
candidates than it was 10 or 20 years ago. It is true that the
African American candidate lost in four of the five statewide races
examined, but three of these were Republicans running in a bad year
for Republicans. In each of these three cases, the other major
statewide race pitted two white candidates (for the U.S. Senate in
Ohio and Pennsylvania and for governor in Maryland), and the
Democratic candidates’ margin of victory was similar to those in
races involving a black Republican.
It is also the case that black candidates in these races tended to do
as well among whites of their party as white candidates did in other
states. For example, the National Election Pool exit poll — which is
conducted with an anonymous ballot and thus less likely than a
telephone or face-to-face interview to elicit a socially desirable
but erroneous response — found that 91% of white Democratic voters
in Tennessee chose Harold Ford, about the same level of support that
white Democrats in Virginia gave Jim Webb (92%). This is also about
the level of support that white Republicans in Maryland gave African
American Michael Steele (94%).
No one would deny that race still matters in U.S. politics. For the
past half century, the political parties have been increasingly
divided in their positions on racial issues, and that, in turn, has
affected voters’ decisions to call themselves Republicans or
Democrats. But this review of exit polls and electoral outcomes in
several recent elections suggests that fewer people are making
judgments about candidates based solely, or even mostly, on race
itself, and that relatively few people are now unwilling to tell
pollsters how they honestly feel about particular candidates. In such
an environment, the high standing of Barack Obama in presidential
polling — or, for that matter, of Colin Powell prior to the 1996
presidential election — represents a significant change in American
politics.
Notes
1 The Senate contest in Mississippi matched a black Democrat
(Fleming) and a white Republican (Lott), but almost no public polling
was conducted in the race.