quote: many white voters didn’t want to seem racist when answering questions about who they were voting for. They said they were voting for Bradley, but they just couldn't do it in the privacy of the voting booth.

This is INCORRECT- at least as pertains to the Bradley election.

There was no "Bradley effect." This issue is widely cited, but it is false. The reality is that Bradley WAS winning on election day and the exit polls accurately reflected that. So white voters exiting the polls were telling the truth. If ONLY votes on voting day had counted Bradley would indeed have won.

Race was a reason Bradley lost but not via the exit poll lying as asserted. The reason Bradley lost was not due to white voters lying to exit pollsters- it was due to elderly suburban absentee ballot voters who broke largely for Deukmejian.

quote: analysis of the 1982 election revealed the weakness in the Bradley Effect theory as Bradley actually won on election day turnout, but lost the absentee vote so badly that Deukmejian pulled ahead to win. That Bradley won the vote on Election Day would hardly seem to suggest a hidden or last minute anti-black backlash--on the contrary, it suggests how easy it would have been for weekend polls and Election Day exit polls to get it wrong, since the decisive group of voters had largely already voted before the final weekend and never showed up at the polls to answer the questions of exit pollsters. [1]