Obama Candidacy Confounds Pollsters Trying to Measure 'Racial Leakage'

WASHINGTON — It goes by many names - the Bradley, Wilder or Dinkins effect - the tendency of black candidates to do better in the polls than at the ballot box. The widely circulated theory is that whites will tell pollsters they will vote for black candidates, then vote for their white rivals on election day. But Democratic presidential front-runner Barack Obama is reversing this trend - doing better in the balloting than in the polls.

The explanation for the absence of what is known among pollsters as "racial leakage" is complicated, say most experts. It involves softening racial attitudes in the country, to be sure. But more importantly, Obama is attracting unprecedented numbers of younger and first-time voters, a segment of the electorate that has always confounded pollsters.

"We've always had a problem of who is a likely voter," said Richard Clark, who conducts the Peach Poll for the University of Georgia's Carl Vinson Institute of Government. "And with Obama attracting so many new voters, the problem has gotten worse," he said. Pollsters are adjusting their models as a result of Obama, but "I'm sure we're in for a few more 'oops moments,'" Clark added.

John Zogby, who has conducted daily tracking polls in many of the Democratic presidential primary and caucus states this year, said it is difficult to isolate any one single factor affecting the pre-polling on Obama. But of all the factors, he said, two are striking: "There are many more late deciders this year than we have seen ... (and) there are also higher turnouts of younger voters, which affects (Obama's) total."

A survey released on Monday for Rock the Vote, a nonprofit organization that has tried to mobilize young voters since 1990, estimated that an unprecedented 7 million Americans under the age of 30 have voted in the presidential primaries and caucuses so far this year, an overwhelming majority of whom have supported Obama.

"Since we've had polling data, we've never had young people pay this much attention this early," said Celinda Lake, a Democratic pollster who conducted the Rock the Vote survey last week with Republican pollster Ed Goeas. "This is not an angry generation. It is an energized generation."

Both pollsters agreed that the increased political energy among young voters, especially Democrats, stems from more than just a "cult of personality" that favors Obama. It began with the Iraq war and the prospect of a renewed military draft, they said, but now involves a host of issues, including the economy, health care and education affordability, all in a highly unpredictable mix.

"The one thing we have seen in this election is that the rules of this election are being written as the events occur," Goeas said.

And that includes the way voters are responding to pollsters on the question of whether they would vote for an African American for president. In the past, most notably in the campaigns of such well-known African-American politicians as former Los Angeles Mayor Tom Bradley, former Virginia Gov. Doug Wilder and former New York Mayor David Dinkins, voters were less than candid with pollsters, producing "racial leakage," the difference between the poll support and the actual vote for a black candidate.

Bradley came within a whisker of becoming California's first black governor in 1982, but lost despite a healthy lead in pre-election polling. Wilder became the first elected black governor in U.S. history in 1989, barely winning in Virginia, again, after leading comfortably in the polls. Dinkins, too, won in 1989 to become New York's first - and only - African-American mayor, but in a victory much closer than the polls had suggested.

In 2006, however, this effect was not evident in the polling in Deval Patrick's victorious gubernatorial race in Massachusetts or in Harold Ford Jr.'s unsuccessful Senate bid in Tennessee.

So "the Bradley-Wilder-Dinkins effect might be a thing of the past and perhaps Obama is continuing the trend," Zogby said.

But Larry Sabato, who closely followed the Wilder campaign as a political scientist at the University of Virginia, cautioned that the lack of "racial leakage" in the Democratic primaries may not signal what is ahead in the general election.

"Democrats are far more liberal on race and just about everything else than the population that shows up to vote in November," Sabato said. "Just because Democrats are not currently exhibiting 'racial leakage' doesn't say much about the general election. The Obama camp has to worry about that in the fall, assuming he's the nominee."