Stemmer meningsmålingene?

- Og taper Obama støtte fordi han er svart?

Det amerikanske valget er fulle av meningsmålinger. Det interessante spørsmålet er om vi kan stole på meningsmålingene. Særlig har den såkalte Bradleyeffekten blitt omdiskutert, et fenomen som beskriver at personer sier i meningsmålinger at de vil stemme på en svart kandidat, men på valgdagen gjør noe annet.

Michael Barone har en glimrende og opplysende kommentar om meningsmålinger som sådan og mer partikulært om rasespørsmålet i Wallstreet Journal.

It's not clear that race was the issue. Recently pollster Lance Tarrance and political consultant Sal Russo, who worked for Bradley's opponent George Deukmejian, have written (Mr. Tarrance in RealClearPolitics.com, and Mr. Russo on this page) that their polls got the election right and that public pollsters failed to take into account a successful Republican absentee voter drive. Blair Levin, a Democrat who worked for Bradley, has argued in the same vein in the New York Times. In Virginia, Douglas Wilder was running around 50% in the polls and his Republican opponent Marshall Coleman was well behind; yet Mr. Wilder won with 50.1% of the vote.

These may have been cases of the common phenomenon of the better-known candidate getting about the same percentage from voters as he did in polls, and the lesser-known candidate doing better with voters than he had in the polls. Some significant percentage of voters will pull the lever for the Republican (or the Democratic) candidate even if they didn't know his name or much about him when they entered the voting booth. In any case, Harvard researcher Daniel Hopkins, after examining dozens of races involving black candidates, reported this year, at a meeting of the Society of Political Methodology, that he'd found no examples of the "Bradley Effect" since 1996.

Les også Sal Russos kommentar Tom Bradley Didn't Lose Because of Race.

Det beste svaret på hvorvidt meningsmålingene faktisk stemmer får vi 4 november.