The Bradley Effect on Gay Marriage Polls

by Michael Jones · 2009-11-04 08:57:00 UTC
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Voting BoothPolling same-sex marriage is always tricky. Many activists are feeling a little burned this morning after a stinging defeat in Maine that rescinded marriage rights for same-sex couples.  In the lead up to the vote, polls showed everything from a tied race to marriage equality supporters leading. It's just a shame that the end results didn't match up with some of the pre-election polls.

Marriage equality lost in Maine by about four percent. As Nate Silver over at FiveThirtyEight writes, that final total is not reflective of where most activists thought the race was heading. Silver himself said that he thought there was only a 30 percent chance of marriage equality failing in Maine. So what went wrong?

We'll know more in the coming days, but at first glance it appears that there could be a Bradley Effect at play in the polling.

The Bradley Effect was a term coined after the 1982 California Governor's race where an African-American candidate named Tom Bradley lost to a white candidate, despite being ahead in most polls. It's a term that generally refers to the fact that in polling questions, people will typically answer how they think the pollster or society wants them to answer, rather than how they really feel (and more importantly, how they intend to vote).

In the case of marriage equality, it could be that people don't want to be labeled as homophobic or bigoted, so they say to pollsters that they support marriage equality. But then when it comes time to vote, they actually cast a contrary ballot.

Was a Bradley Effect at play in Maine? It's too early to tell. And as Nate Silver notes, there could be many more issues surrounding the marriage equality vote in Maine, from a large rural vs. urban divide, to the fact that in an off-year election more anti-gay folks were motivated to head to the polls.

But it is entirely possible that as activists, we've succeeded in drawing a line in the sand that makes it unpopular for people to say publicly that they don't support marriage rights. Changing their minds once they enter a voting booth, however, is going to take a whole heck of a lot more work.

(Photo courtesy of Muffet's photostream on Flickr.)

Michael Jones is a Change.org Editor. He has worked in the field of human rights communications for a decade, most recently for Harvard Law School.
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