By Leon Hadar.
LIKE Barack Obama, the first African- American US president, Thomas Bradley, the 38th mayor of Los Angeles, made history when he was elected the first African-American mayor of the city in 1973 – a position in which he served for 20 years.
But when Mr Bradley decided to run for governor of California in 1982 and later in 1986, he was defeated each time by the Republican George Deukmejian – and that despite opinion polls conducted on the eve of the election that showed him being ahead (and by a large margin in 1982), giving rise to a term that only political junkies may be familiar with: the Bradley Effect.
Trying to explain the discrepancies between the pre-election poll results and the election outcome, pollsters proposed that when a non- white candidate runs against a white candidate, some white (or even black) voters would say that they are undecided or plan to vote for the non-white candidate although they intend to vote for the white contender.
The theory assumes that in a politically correct (PC) environment, voting for a white candidate against a non-white one may be regarded as socially unacceptable behaviour. So voters who don’t want to be tagged as non-PC would lie about their preference for the white candidate.
Now that, for the first time in history, a woman is running as a US presidential candidate of a major party and seems to have a better-than- 50-per-cent chance of winning the race this year, while her main rival is a white man who also happens to be a misogynist, is it possible that the results of recent opinion polls that show Hillary Clinton having a big lead over the Republican contender, Donald Trump, reflect what could be described as a Hillary Effect?
Is it likely that many voters – and, in particular, female voters – will be reluctant to admit to pollsters that they are planning to cast their ballot for the much maligned Mr Trump, who has been tagged by the Mainstream Media (MSM) as someone who insults women (and others) on a regular basis?
Whether there is or isn’t a Hillary Effect, journalists and pundits – including celebrated pollsters like Nate Silver from FiveThirtyEight , whose forecast of Mr Obama’s presidential win in 2012 was on target, but who failed miserably to predict Mr Trump’s electoral surge among Republican primary voters – are now being forced to treat with many, many grains of salt the results of most current opinion polls that suggest that the former secretary of state would beat the former TV reality show star by a wide margin in November, and perhaps even win by a landslide.
According to the conventional wisdom (that sometimes is correct), she has a better-than-50- per-cent chance of winning the 270 electoral votes she needs to take the White House. At the same time, under most electoral scenarios that have been drawn, Mr Trump is seen as being dead on arrival.
You don’t have to be a political expert to decide whether Hillary or the Donald would be occupying the White House. Just extrapolate from the numbers that point to Mr Trump’s crushing negatives, and that show that 6-in-10 Americans have an unfavourable view of the New York real estate magnate (while only 36 per cent view him favourably); and that he is entering the general election with very poor approval ratings among almost all demographic groups – and especially among women, Hispanics and African Americans.
Mitt Romney, the Republican presidential candidate in 2012, lost 73 per cent of the Hispanic vote and received only 44 per cent of the women vote, which could explain in part why he lost that race. But Mr Trump is now viewed unfavourably by 82 per cent of Hispanics and is trailing Mrs Clinton among women by almost 20 percentage points (34 per cent to 54 per cent). This means that even if he improves his electoral position among these crucial demographic groups, it’s unlikely that he could end up doing better than Mr Romney with Hispanics and women or, for that matter, with Millennials and African Americans.
In many respects, Mrs Clinton and the Democrats seem to be positioned on the winning side of American history. The electoral groups that constituted the winning coalition that elected and re-elected Mr Obama (including Hispanics, African Americans, Asian Americans, educated urbanites, single women, Millennials, and gays) are growing in number, while the electoral base of the Republican Party (dominated by white men, rural voters, and Evangelical Christians) is shrinking. Also, American society is becoming more accepting of ethnic and racial diversity, and more liberal on social-cultural issues.
One example of the way this demographic transformation has been changing the balance of power between Democrats and Republicans has been the electoral shifts in California – which once upon a time was regarded as “blue” (Democratic) or “purple” (swinging), and is now fully in Democratic hands. These changes reflect the transformation of California from a white-dominated state into one in which whites have become a minority while the Hispanic population has been growing. Hence you have Latinos surpassing the number of whites in 2014 (39 per cent to 38 per cent).
In that context, Hispanic voters have turned against the GOP after the then Republican governor of California (Pete Wilson) pressed in the 1990s for legislation that would have limited the access of the mostly Hispanic illegal immigrants in the state – those whom Mr Trump has referred to as “rapists” – to government services.
Indeed, Hispanics have emerged as an important electoral group that could help tilt presidential elections not only in California, but also in purple states like Florida, Colorado, New Mexico and Virginia – that President Obama won in 2008 and could also, according to some analysts, turn a red state like Arizona into a blue one this year (and at some point in the future, even a super-red state like Texas with its growing Hispanic population could turn blue).
While the Donald and his supporters are not denying that these demographic changes are taking place, they note that whites maintain a clear majority among American voters, in general, and in important purple states like Ohio, Michigan and Wisconsin, in particular, and even in traditionally blue states like Pennsylvania and New Jersey.
The bottom line is that the majority of American voters are white men and women, and the majority of them voted for the Republican Romney in 2012, and many more of them are going to vote for Republican Trump in 2016, according to calculations by the Trump camp.
Mr Trump is counting, in particular, on the support of angry white blue-collar workers in the Rust Belt states of Ohio, Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, who have driven his primary victories and who are blaming free trade and illegal immigrants for their economic woes – they are attracted to the billionaire’s populist anti-trade and anti-immigration policies.
Many of these white blue-collar workers are Democrats or independents who would now be switching their support to the Republican candidate and could, in theory, make it possible for Mr Trump to win states where crumbling manufacturing industries have left behind many unemployed workers who count on the brash New Yorker to bring back good jobs to their states.
But the Democrats believe that the Trumpists are daydreaming and counter by suggesting that for every angry white blue-collar worker who would supposedly vote for the Republican presidential candidate, there are a larger number of white suburban women, educated professionals and young voters who would cast their ballot for Hillary and help her beat the Donald in Ohio, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, and perhaps even in southern states that are traditionally carried by the Republicans. Hence a recent poll suggested that the Democratic candidate now has an electoral edge over the Republican in Georgia.
But those white blue-collar workers seem to be mad as hell this year and they really don’t like Mrs Clinton, who found herself being bashed by angry miners in West Virginia before the Democratic primary in the state this week – they accused her of scheming to destroy their industry in the name of her environmental agenda. If these kinds of voters show up in large numbers in the voting booths on Election Day in November, they could deliver some key states to the Donald and deny Hillary a victory that many still see as certain.
