THE BRADLEY EFFECT WAS ABOUT GUNS, NOT RACISM
Joe Mathews
New America Foundation
articles/2009/bradley_effect_was_about_guns_not_ra cism_17339
Sept 8 2009
California Journal of Politics and Policy | 2009 Asked why he won,
Deukmejian said he thought he was the stronger candidate, but mentioned
the absentee vote program, too. He paused. "I think it was the gun
control initiative," he said.
About These Icons Asked why he won, Deukmejian said he thought he
was the stronger candidate, but mentioned the absentee vote program,
too. He paused. "I think it was the gun control initiative," he
said. Related Programs: New America in California
Nelson Rising, chairman of Tom Bradley’s 1982 campaign for California
governor, still remembers the phone call. Bradley called him shortly
after 4 a.m. on a long election night, when it was clear Bradley had
lost to Republican attorney general George Deukmejian.
"You were right," Bradley told Rising a bit wearily.
With those words, Bradley, the Democratic mayor of Los
Angeles, acknowledged that a political mistake had cost him the
governorship. And, despite all the theories that the election produced
a "Bradley effect"–a supposed secret racist vote undetected by
polling–the mayor himself knew that his loss had different causes.
The main cause was guns. Against Rising’s advice, Bradley had endorsed
Proposition 15, a statewide ballot initiative that would have put
a freeze on purchases of new handguns. Bradley and Proposition
15 both had a lead in the polls when Bradley decided to back the
initiative. But there was a huge backlash against Proposition 15
in conservative California precincts. The resulting turnout was so
overwhelming that it took down Bradley–just as Rising had predicted
in a campaign meeting months earlier.
"I will never forget that meeting," Rising recalled. "I said,
‘I don’t own a gun. I don’t intend to own a gun. If I could design
a world without guns, I would. But Tom, if you support this, you
can’t win.’" The mayor’s other political aides were less worried
at the time. Prop. 15 had a lead in the polls in the early fall,
and so did the mayor. "The view was that it was a win-win," Rising
recalled. What’s more, Bradley, a former L.A. cop, believed strongly in
gun control. But Prop. 15 had become a rallying point for Deukmejian,
and helped bring out unexpectedly high turnouts in inland California,
where shooting and hunting were very much a way of life. This surge
in turnout changed the shape of the electorate. Surveys at the time
showed that 35 percent of California’s registered voters had a gun
in the house. Among those who cast ballots in November 1982, nearly
half were gunowners, according to exit surveys.
"Without Tom Bradley endorsing Prop. 15," said Steve Merksamer, who
served as campaign chair for Deukmejianand as the governor’s chief
of staff, "we would have lost."
When the 1982 contest is recalled today, it is often assumed that
pre-election polls showing a Bradley victory were wrong because
of race. But there is no clear evidence of that. Last fall, when
some commentators were suggesting a "Bradley effect" could explain
presidential candidate Barack Obama’s lead in the polls, I examined
surveys and news stories from the 1982 race, and talked with more
than a dozen major players in both the Bradley and Deukmejian
campaigns. Only two expressed any belief in the idea that the 1982
California governor’s race saw a "Bradley effect." And even those two
campaign workers, former Bradley aides Phil Depoian and Bill Elkins,
maintain that without Prop. 15, Bradley almost certainly would have
won anyway.
"Today, when I hear very intelligent people talking about the
Bradley effect as if it actually happened, I just scratch my head,"
said Rising. "If there is such an effect, it shouldn’t be named for
Bradley, or associated with him in any way."
According to those who were there, the real lessons of the Bradley
campaign involve the dangers posed by divisive issues and by
a candidate’s own allies. Bradley’s campaign suffered three
self-inflicted wounds it could not overcome.
The first, of course, was guns. Proposition 15, which put a cap on
gun ownership, had been qualified for the ballot by men who were
Bradley’s friends; chief among them was John Phillips. Prop. 15
proposed to limit the number of pistols in private hands in the state
to the number legally owned as of April 30, 1983. Only law enforcement
personnel could buy new guns.
Some Bradley aides said they tried to convince Phillips to wait
and qualify the measure for a later election, so as not to hurt the
mayor’s campaign. Phillips, later an attorney in Washington, didn’t
remember any such appeals.
What Phillips remembered was having all eyes on him at the election
night party at the Biltmore Hotel in downtown L.A. "Everybody blamed
me for the defeat of the first black governor of California–I know
Bradley felt that himself," said Phillips. Some people in the campaign
still do.
"Now, I always smile when I read about the Bradley effect," said
Phillips, jovially. "Thank God I’ve been vindicated 25 years
later. It’s not my fault."
The second wound: absentee ballots. The 1982 election in California was
the first under new laws that made it easier to vote absentee. Voters
no longer needed a specific reason–such as illness or a trip out of
state–to request an absentee ballot. Democrats had lobbied for the
changes, but Bradley’s campaign did little to take advantage.
Republicans, led largely by people involved in that year’s U.S. Senate
campaign of then-San Diego Mayor Pete Wilson, skillfully exploited
the new rules by sending absentee ballot request forms to more than
two million registered Republicans. The forms included an envelope
with postage already paid.
"I think it was significant," said Wilson, who served eight years
in the Senate and two terms as California governor. "We figured,
‘We’ll get a higher percentage of our registered voters to vote than
the Democrats will get of their registered voters.’"The Republican
strategy worked. Bradley won 19,000 more votes than Deukmejian among
those who cast ballots in precincts. But Deukmejian won the absentees
by more than 100,000.
In a 1983 report on the election, pollster Mervin Field, who had
predicted a Bradley victory based on exit polling, said this surge
in absentee voting was the "primary cause" of the poor election
night prognostication. Polling models had been based on an absentee
vote similar to the 304,000 votes cast in the previous gubernatorial
election in 1978. But in November 1982, more than 506,000 votes for
governor came from absentees.
Finally, the third wound: low African-American turnout. This was a
three-part problem, involving black voters, regional rivalries and,
some suggest, football.
Bradley, wary of being seen as "the black candidate," didn’t campaign
in the black community and didn’t do enough to turn out black voters,
some aides recalled. "The position we took was, ‘My God, this is
a historical event and black folks are going to turn out as never
before,’" said Bill Elkins, one of Bradley’s closest aides. "And
instead, the turnout did not reach the level we thought it would."
In their turnout models, pollsters had expected that minority
voters–black, Latino and Asian–would makeup 20 percent of the
electorate. Post election estimates put the figure at just 15
percent. Black turnout–in fact, Democratic turnout, in general–was
lower than expected in the Bay Area. Campaign veterans on both sides
of the race believe northern Californians didn’t trust Bradley,
in large part because he was mayor of their unpopular regional rival.
Deukmejian told me in an interview last fall: "Tom Bradley was popular
in southern California, but people throughout the rest of the state
were not all that comfortable having someone who was mayor of Los
Angeles as their governor."
To make matters worse, Los Angeles, under Bradley, had lured away the
popular Oakland Raiders football team that same fall. "It was about
football," said Bill Norris, a longtime Bradley supporter who was a
federal appellate judge at the time. "The turnout in black precincts
in Oakland was below expectations, and I believe that’s because of
hard feelings that L.A. had stolen the team."
Deukmejian’s campaign avoided the subject of race, except at one
crucial moment a month before the election. Bill Roberts, a campaign
consultant, told a group of reporters that public opinion polls
might not be picking up racial bias in the vote. Deukmejian dismissed
Roberts from the campaign, but Roberts’s comments, as much as anything,
are responsible for the idea of a "Bradley effect."
Some Bradley supporters thought Roberts’s comments, while repudiated
by Deukmejian, had an impact on the race. But pollsters and political
pros said there’s no clear evidence of that. Bradley, in fact,
did well with white voters in urban and suburban areas, where gun
ownership is lower. The Los Angeles mayor won relatively conservative
San Diego County, quite a feat for a Democrat.
In his postelection report, Field–while allowing that the gun issue,
absentee votes and lower-than-expected minority turnout explained
polling errors–clung to the idea that Bradley may have lost the
election because of his race. Field based this view on a series of
statistical extrapolations from the same exit polls that led to his
faulty predictions on election night.
More than three percent of Deukmejian voters indicated in exit polls
that their vote was based on a desire not to vote for the black
candidate. Field, extrapolating, estimated that the three percent
amounted to 136,000 racist votes for Deukmejian. Exit surveys also
found that 0.6 percent, or about 23,000 Bradley voters under Field’s
extrapolations, had voted against Deukmejian because of the attorney
general’s Armenian background. And finally, Field found that Bradley
out-performed a typical Democratic statewide candidate by about three
percent points among black voters. On that basis, Field estimated
that Bradley gained16,500 votes because of his race.
Throwing those figures together, Field said Deukmejianhad a net
advantage of 96,000 votes from prejudice. Deukmejian won by 93,000.
Field’s view left hard feelings. Some former Deukmejianaides still
blame Field for creating a lasting impression that there was something
wrong with the election.
Officials of both campaigns said their polls showed a tightening
race. The Deukmejian tracking poll results, which his former of
chief staff Merksamer keeps framed in his Sacramento law office,
show a rapidly narrowing race. Bradley was up 12 on Oct. 7, up four
on Oct. 14, and up just one point in the final tracking poll, two
days before the election.
"We thought it was going to be close," said Rising of the Bradley
campaign.
Setting aside the strange math, it’s worth noting that the exit polls
weren’t wrong just in Bradley’s race. In the U.S. Senate contest,
public polls and exit polls also predicted an arrow victory for the
Democratic candidate, the departing Gov. Jerry Brown. Wilson beat
Brown by six points.
Wilson recalled that the mood was dark at his election night
headquarters at first, as the polling suggested he had lost, before
the actual returns brightened spirits. Around midnight, Wilson talked
by phone with Deukmejian, who said he’d lost.
In an interview last fall, Deukmejian said election night was hard. "I
was very, very dejected. And I was praying." Not wanting to hang out
at the election night party and wait for what might be bad news, he
went home to Long Beachand stayed up all night, listening to returns
on a news radio station. He learned he had won shortly before dawn.
Asked why he won, Deukmejian said he thought he was the stronger
candidate, but mentioned the absentee vote program, too. He paused. "I
think it was the gun control initiative," he said.
Bradley, who died in 1998, didn’t dwell on the defeat. He ran
again in 1986, but was beaten badly by Deukmejian, then a popular
incumbent. Depoian, who managed the 1982 campaign for the mayor, said,
"Ten years later, if you were to ask Bradley what happened, he’d say,
‘I don’t know. Maybe it was gun control.’ He didn’t talk about it. He
was a very forward-looking guy.’"
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