What I learned on the trail: 5 things the polls don’t capture about the election

I just spent three days canvassing for Barack Obama in Pennsylvania. I won’t claim this makes me an expert about the election. However, I do think I learned a few things that help provide some context to the polls, which continue to show Obama well ahead of McCain. I’ll lay out my thoughts over the next couple of days, starting with the first one, here:

1. There are very few truly undecided voters—but "aversive racists" could decide the election.
With just three weeks to go until the election, I believe the vast majority of voters have made up their minds. And most will vote along party lines, as they do in just about every election. Yet some recent polls continue to show as much as 11% of the electorate to be undecided. That’s inconsistent with historical numbers; by this point in 2004, for example, some state polls showed just 4% of voters to be on the fence. So, what’s the real story?

To put it bluntly, I believe most "undecided" voters are actually what Nicholas Kristof recently referred to as "aversive racists"—people who have unconscious racist tendencies that they don’t even admit to themselves. I came across numerous "undecided" voters in my door-knocking work, including some with "D" and even "L" next to their names on my list. None were openly hostile to me, but virtually all declined my offer of additional information to help them make up their minds. These voters, I believe, had made their choice, but didn’t want to admit it, even to themselves.

My experience jibes with recent reports like the one in yesterday’s New York Times that provides some perspective on the "Bradley effect," and quotes Adam Berinsky, an M.I.T. professor who has written about "I don’t know" voters. According to Berinsky, New York voters who felt uncomfortable voting for David Dinkins in his 1989 run against Rudolph Giuliani because of Dinkins’ race, were more likely to tell pollsters that they didn’t know who they would be voting for. Dinkins won, but did so by just 2%, despite polls that showed him ahead by as much as 14%.

Does this mean polls need to show Obama with a similar lead in order for him to win? Or that we can assume that all but about 4% of today’s undecideds are really in McCain’s corner? No, of course not. The numbers are inexact enough, and disparities among various polls large enough, that it’s hard to know for sure how many false undecideds are really out there. And I believe (or, perhaps, want to believe) that we are also living in another era, one in which the race of a candidate is simply not an issue for the vast majority of American voters. However, in a close election, the vast majority may not decide the winner. As Pew’s Andrew Kohut commented in the Times, “How much we are under-representing people who are intolerant and therefore unlikely to vote for Obama is an open question. I suspect not a great deal, but maybe some. And ‘maybe some’ could be crucial in a tight election.”

However, the aversive racists aren’t the only uncountable group that may play a crucial roll in this election – and other factors may well be working in Obama’s favor. More on that next time.

This entry was posted on Monday, October 13th, 2008 at 6:33 am