I’ll write more about this tomorrow, but I don’t buy the idea that Obama lost due to the “Wilder effect” (that voters told pollsters that they’d vote for a black candidate, but secretly voted for white candidates in the secrecy of the polling booth). The main reason is that there’s a plausible alternative hypothesis, which is that the large Obama lead in the polls sent independents into the Republican primary to vote for McCain. But we’ll have to take a look at the data tomorrow, when we’ll have fine-grained information. More soon…
Author: Steven M. Teles
Steven Teles is a Visiting Fellow at the Yale Center for the Study of American Politics. He is the author of Whose Welfare? AFDC and Elite Politics (University Press of Kansas), and co-editor of Ethnicity, Social Mobility and Public Policy (Cambridge). He is currently completing a book on the evolution of the conservative legal movement, co-editing a book on conservatism and American Political Development, and beginning a project on integrating political analysis into policy analysis. He has also written journal articles and book chapters on international free market think tanks, normative issues in policy analysis, pensions and affirmative action policy in Britain, US-China policy and federalism. He has taught at Brandeis, Boston University, Holy Cross, and Hamilton colleges, and been a research fellow at Harvard, Princeton and the University of London.
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