Silly Rabbit—Data's Not for Analyzing!

Weird Janet Elder column on whether people lie about voting for black candidates: the evidence tells her that they don't and she writes the column as if they do. After some background on Virginia's 1989 election (the one where a black Democrat underperformed the exit polls):

In a more recent election, the Tennessee Senate race between Harold Ford, a black Democrat and Bob Corker, a white Republican, the questions about race and polling played out differently.

Pete Brodnitz who did polling for the Ford campaign, said Mr. Ford was initially hurt by what had become conventional wisdom that polls overstate the strength of black candidates. It caused people to discount Mr. Ford, he said.

"In the beginning everybody said he didn't have a chance, he can't raise money, he's never run statewide, even if I see data that he is competitive," he said.

The point is that the people who discounted Ford were wrong. On election day he was lagging badly in the polls, and at the end of the night he lost by only 3 points. Forty-one percent of whites said they'd vote for him and forty percent did vote for him.

Earlier post about this stuff here. It's not a huge issue apart from the way it pushes a false, pity-party narrative about Barack Obama.