The election: Could the polls be wrong?

Take heart, John McCain, said Bill Greener in Salon.com. Whatever the polls may say, this is still America, where miracles can happen—especially when your opponent is the first African-American to run for president. Polls are showing Barack Obama ahead in key battleground states, but in most of them, the Democrat is still not getting more than 50 percent of the vote. “If history is any guide,” Obama’s lead could well evaporate on Nov. 4. It won’t be because of the so-called Bradley effect, whereby voters tell pollsters they’re voting for a black candidate but let their racial animus surface in the privacy of the voting booth. Instead, we may find that virtually all the “undecided” voters actually had made up their minds to vote for McCain, giving him 5 percent to 8 percent more than polls show—and the presidency.

If the undecideds put McCain over the top, said Aaron Mishkin in The Weekly Standard, it won’t necessarily be because they’re racists. It’s the fear of being thought a racist that makes them reluctant to admit they don’t like Obama for perfectly valid reasons of policy and experience. The media keeps telling them that Obama is the future, and that anyone who doesn’t support him is either a bigot or a moron. So when these “undecideds” choose to disagree, political scientists may have a new phrase in their lexicon: “the Obama effect.”

If you analyze recent election results, said Andrew Romano in Newsweek.com, that theory “really doesn’t hold water.” In some elections, yes, undecided voters have broken disproportionately for a white candidate over a black candidate, but the reverse has also happened. More relevant, surely, is Obama’s record in the primaries, in which he went up against the white Hillary Clinton in election after election and actually “outperformed the polls by an average of 3.3 points over the course of the entire primary season.” Typical polling models simply don’t account for the unprecedented enthusiasm for Obama’s historic candidacy among black voters and people under 30. This country has come a long way over the past decade, said USA Today in an editorial. Some analysts are even speculating that Obama will benefit from a so-called reverse Bradley effect, by which some working-class whites who are furious at the GOP vote for Obama “while telling bigoted friends” and pollsters they’re for McCain.

Still, it would be naïve to write off the potential impact of racism in this election, said Michael Powell in The New York Times. White, working-class voters interviewed in small towns in Pennsylvania—a critical battleground state—frankly admitted they were alarmed by Obama. “Close friends, real close, tell me they can’t get past his race,” said union plumber Vince Pisano, 47, an Obama supporter. But there are also plenty of voters like Peggy Doffin, 79, who supported Hillary Clinton during the primary and didn’t much care for Obama. Then she listened to his convention speech. “Chills ran down my back,” Doffin says. The country’s economic meltdown finalized her decision, convincing her that the country needs a dramatic change in leadership. “Race just don’t matter to me anymore,” she says. Nor does it matter to enough voters to “flip this election,’’ said Frank Rich, also in the Times. With the nation’s economy and foreign policy in shambles, Republicans have nothing left to offer but coded appeals to “real Americans’’ that take the working class for easily manipulated dupes. “This seems to be the election year when voters are figuring that out.’’