Bradley Effect

The Bradley effect, also known less commonly as the Wilder effect, is a theory concerning an observed discrepancy between voter opinion polls and actual election outcomes in some United States elections where a white candidate and a non-white candidate run against each other. The theory proposes that some white voters who actually intend to vote for the white candidate will nonetheless tell pollsters that they remain undecided or are likely to vote for the non-white candidate instead; it was named after the Los Angeles mayor Tom Bradley, an African-American candidate who lost the 1982 California gubernatorial election to the California attorney general George Deukmejian despite having led in voter polls going into the election itself. The Bradley effect holds that these inaccurate polls were skewed by the phenomenon of social desirability bias, since some voters give an inaccurate polling response for fear that revealing their true preference will open them to a charge of racial motivation, feeling under pressure to instead give an answer that seems more publicly acceptable or politically correct.