DAVID PAUL KUHN, Politico
- Less than a week before the 1989 election for Virginia governor, two newspaper polls showed L. Douglas Wilder, a black Democrat, comfortably ahead of his GOP opponent by between 9 and 11 points. But when the ballots were counted, it was a nail-biter that Wilder won by fewer than 7,000 votes.
Political scientists dubbed it “the Wilder effect,” or referred to it by its earlier name, “the Bradley effect,” after Tom Bradley, the black mayor of Los Angeles who lost the 1982 California governor’s contest despite being up in the polls by as much as 22 points in the weeks before Election Day.
“The Wilder effect, the Bradley effect, is on the minds of everybody, without exception,” Neil Newhouse, who directs NBC News/Wall Street Journal polling, said, referring to what pollsters say is the phenomenon of some white people lying to pollsters about their support for black candidates.
