The importance of Virginia this election season

“I No Politics” has a pretty good post about the importance of Virginia here. But he fails to touch on many important points and the article is superficial at best.

I don’t think there’s necessarily a correlation between Warner’s advertising and the pro-Obama polling (as the article suggests). The wording is a bit unfortunate. There will be a lot of Warner-McCain voters (as clearly evidenced by the ~60 points Warner seems to be polling vs. the barely 50 points Obama has been able to muster). However like I reasserted many times in the past, Obama might benefit from the Warner coattails. Warner has incredible support in Southern Virginia (more so that Jim Webb and Tim Kaine – as evidenced by their rather razor sharp election margins), and he might make some voters comfortable enough with voting for a Democrat (even if that Democrat is significantly more liberal than Mark Warner).

Why the discussion on race benefits Sen. Obama

Many “pundits” have often cited the issue of race as one of the biggest detriments to Sen. Barack Obama’s presidential ambitions. But I respectfully disagree. In this article I hope to deconstruct the myth of the Bradley effect and lay out an argument for why Sen. Obama’s race benefits him.

1. The myth of the Bradley Effect - The Bradley Effect is a belief that white voters will claim to vote for the minority candidate but pull the lever for the white candidate. The name stems from former LA Mayor Tom Bradley who ran for Governor. Polls showed him with a slight lead, however he lost the election. Many pundits believe voters couldn’t bring themselves to vote for the African American candidate. The problem with this is, George Deukmejian’s (Deukmejian defeated Bradley) general election pollster claims that the internals showed the race too close to call. In fact, the media picked up on the supposed Bradley victory because the Mervin Field (the state’s top public pollster) predicted so. Not only does, research has shown that the Bradley Effect faded out some time in the mid-1990s.