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Is There A Hidden McCain Vote?

By matt carter ⋅ October 30, 2008 ⋅  Email This Post ⋅  Print This Post ⋅ Post a comment

Will undecideds break largely for McCain?

It’s what Republican pollsters have been saying the last few weeks, and seems to be what Chuck Todd at NBC thinks as well. The net effect would be that Obama’s share of the vote is what current polling pegs it at, while McCain would scoop up the lion’s share of the undecideds, raising his standing on that wave of late-breaking undecideds.

If that scenario is the case, then the race is a lot tighter than it appears, because McCain’s numbers plus the number of undecideds is close to Obama’s numbers in polls. Polling guru Mark Blumenthal, however, disagrees with this scenario, and has some contemporary data to back it up:

As I reviewed in this space back in June, the effect was best described in a 1993 report [PDF] by Larry Hugick of Princeton Survey Research. He examined the final polls in 10 biracial elections in the 1980s and early 1990s and found that they accurately forecast the percentage of the vote received by the black candidate, but typically understated the share of the vote won by the white candidate.

“Only black candidates who broke the 50% level in the final poll were victorious,” Hugick wrote 15 years ago. To “improve the accuracy of pre-election polls in biracial elections,” he suggested a new method: “[Assign] all the black undecided vote to the black candidate and all the remaining undecided vote to the white candidate.”

Today some — including Republican consultant Bill Greener — argue that we should apply Hugick’s method to the current polls. “If you’re a black candidate running against a white candidate, what you see is what you get,” Greener wrote recently for Salon.com. “If you’re not polling above 50 percent, you should be worried.”

McCain pollster Bill McInturff appears to apply that logic in a memo released Wednesday. He argues that “the campaign” in the battleground states “is functionally tied” (emphasis added), in part since Barack Obama’s support is “dropping below 50 percent.” Echoing Greener, he added, “I am becoming more and more convinced Senator Obama ‘gets what he gets in the tracking.’”

His conclusion on this:

if we focus on the data before us, we find little or no evidence of a hidden vote for John McCain.

Tags: bradley effect, poll, presidential election