I lived in Manhattan in 1989 when David Dinkins ran to become the first African-American mayor of New York, challenging an entrenched but increasingly unpopular Ed Koch in the primary, then defeating Rudy Giuliani in the general election. In that race, Dinkins was far ahead in the polls but didn’t win by much. Here’s how Adam Berinsky of The Monkey Cage describes it:
I
examined data from a 1989 New York City Mayoral election. There, the black
candidate David Dinkins held a fourteen- to eighteen-point advantage over his
white opponent Rudolph Giuliani in polls taken only days before the election,
but ended up winning the race by less than two percentage points. Correcting
the polls using statistical techniques that accounted for the “don’t know”
improved the predictive power of those polls. Clearly, some people who said
they didn’t know how they were going to vote in fact did know – they just
didn’t want to tell us.
The same thing happened earlier, in 1982, to one of LA’s most popular, and first black, mayors, Tom Bradley, when he ran for governor of California. The gap between the polls and the electoral results was so large that the phenomenon was named "the Bradley effect." Way ahead in polls right up to election day, Bradley lost decisively to George Deukmejian.
I’m so afraid that this presidential race may be tainted by some of the same behavior. Of course I’m not covering new ground, just aggregating some good thoughts. Listen to the work of the very wise Jill Miller Zimon at Writes Like She Talks, in which she quotes Tim Wise’s "This Is Your Nation on White Privilege." The fact that that post generated some very heated comments speaks to the currency of this issue, right now.
Continue reading OBAMA AND RACE: THE LESSONS OF DINKINS AND BRADLEY