Could McCain be the First Bradley Effect President?

The race for president is getting to an interesting kind of point in relation to racial politics.

Barack Obama has pulled ahead by 5-8 points in the most recent tracking polls. Obama got a boost this week as a result of McCain's wretched gambits to "suspend his campaign," demand that the presidential debate be delayed, and interfere with negotiations on the bailout. But the trend toward Obama has been developing for about three weeks. Obama plowed ahead in his steadily charismatic kind of way, while John McCain lost his footing as persistent questions about the Palin nomination and his own misstatements about the prime minister of Spain and the financial meltdown put him on the defensive.

There's even more reason for Obama to be optimistic over the next week. Tracking polls like Rasmussen and Gallup have generally shown Obama as having less of a lead than ABC, CBS, the Los Angeles Times, and Newsweek. As TNR reports, it's reasonable to expect that polls will come out next week with Obama in double-digit leads.

Then there's the Bradley Effect.

The Bradley Effect is named after Tom Bradley, the African-American mayor of Los Angeles who lost to George Deukmejian in the governor's race despite having a substantial lead in the polls going into the election. In elections involving Bradley, Douglas Wilder, David Dinkins, and other black candidates, up to 10% of white voters will say that they're voting for African-American candidates to pollsters but still aren't willing to vote for them.

There is some argument that the Bradley Effect diminished in the 2006 election, but there's also a chance that the symbolic significance of electing the first black president might bring the Bradley Effect back into play. There's already reports that Obama might lose 6% of the total vote because white Democrats aren't willing to vote for a black person for president. What if other whites feel the same way but aren't willing to express those sentiments to pollsters.

Now that Barack Obama's lead is expected to climb into the 6-10 point range, he's entering the "Bradley Zone." This is where Obama could lose the election even though the polling showed him with a statistically significant lead (for example, Gallup's margin of error is 2%).

Let's say that Obama maintains a 6-8 point margin up to election time. That would set up a unique kind of choice for the American electorate. Either Barack Obama would become the first African-American president or John McCain would become the first "Bradley Effect" president.