Wednesday, January 09, 2008

The hidden racism in USA

I am disappointed and rather angry about stunning loss of Barack Obama in the New Hampshire Primary election today. Every single poll (taken until this morning) showed Obama winning. Many predicted a double-digit victory margin. But still Hillary Clinton won. What happened? None of the pundits in the MSM have a clear explanation for it. Some reasons suggested like Hilary crying yesterday, doing well in the Saturday debate, etc do not make much sense to me. How can all the polls be so wrong? I have a better explanation for this. It is the notorious ‘Bradley effect’ which made the polls go so wrong. This was named after the black mayor of Los Angeles, Tom Bradley, who lost the election for California governership to a white person, after polls showing him leading 9 to 22 points. The black candidates won the mayoral races in Chicago and New York by very narrow margins despite the polls showing them with leads in double digits. This phenomenon is attributed to the reluctance of the white people to tell the pollsters that they are going to vote against a black candidate. I am confident that this is what happened to Obama in New Hampshire. People just brushed off the pollsters there with a ‘Yeah, yeah, I am for Obama’ with no intention of voting for him. Of course, this raises the question about the Obama win Iowa, a state with 96% white people, correctly predicted by the polls. The answer is that Iowa Caucus was an ‘open’ event, where voters had to stand in public in groups for each candidate, to be counted. There were no private voting booths where they could exercise their racism! So, most of these ‘tell and switch’ people might have stayed home in Iowa. (Some might have even voted for Obama to create a good impression to their neighbors!) As a result, the Iowa polls were fairly accurate.
In summary, being black is still is a big factor in this election, and it is quite unlikely that Obama will win the nomination. I am so disappointed!

0 Comments:

Post a Comment

<< Home