Well, the cat’s out of the bag. As both Noam Scheiber and Chris Bowers have written about today, it no longer much matters whether a Bradley/Wilder Effect tilted NH to Clinton; discussion of that possibility in NH and beyond has taken on a life of its own. Scheiber calls it the “Bradley Effect Effect.”
In case you’re just tuning in, the Bradley Effect (or Bradley/Wilder Effect) is an insider term for the phenomenon of voters telling pollsters they’ll vote for an African-American candidate, and then pulling the lever against that candidate in the privacy of the voting booth. In the absence of any other completely convincing explanation of why all the polls in NH were wrong, it’s become a very popular theory, for obvious reasons. And that’s particularly true among African-American political observers, for equally obvious reasons having to do with the last few centuries of world and American history.
If you think about it, there are three different racially-motivated “Bradley Effects” that could theoretically have been in play in NH, and could be in play down the road.
There’s the classic “Bradley Effect” of voters lying about their preferences and then indulging racist impulses in the privacy of the voting booth (which is why, presumably, it didn’t happen to Obama in IA, where there’s no voting booth and no privacy). There’s the second-order “Bradley Effect” of lying to pollsters out of fear of being perceived as racist, followed by a more honest actual vote. And then, particularly in a Democratic primary (unlike the actual Bradley and Wilder elections), there’s a third-order “Bradley Effect” of a vote cast out of fear of other voters’ racism–i.e., concerns about an African-American candidate’s electibility (though this theory is undermined by the NH exit polls in which a lot of HRC voters deemed Obama the most electible candidate). This last “effect,” of course, has been widely reported as prevelant among African-Americans prior to IA, and particularly in SC, where for a long time Clinton was running ahead of or even with Obama among black voters.
We could now be about to witness a fourth-order “Bradley Effect,” if African-American voters in SC and elsewhere react to discussion of this issue by uniting behind Obama to counter-act perceptions of white voter semi-secret racism.
It’s all pretty complicated, eh? Maybe it’s good to get the race issue on the table and deal with it now rather than later; it’s inevitably going to be a factor in the decisive phases of the nomination contest, and if Obama wins, in the general election as well. But it is a little ironic that it’s come to the fore at this moment. After all, an African-American presidential candidate has just finished first and then a close second in two of the whitest states in the country. Thanks to the expectations game going into the second of these exceptionally honkified electorates, we’re having to face race straight up, and right away.