A useful corrective to the Bradley Effect

From the Bradley campaign:

On election night in 1982, with 3,000 supporters celebrating prematurely at a downtown hotel, I was upstairs reviewing early results that suggested Bradley would probably lose.

But he wasn't losing because of race. He was losing because an unpopular gun control initiative and an aggressive Republican absentee ballot program generated hundreds of thousands of Republican votes no pollster anticipated, giving Mr. Deukmejian a narrow victory.

I heard Newt say this on ABC, and thought it sounded completely reasonable, but then he ruined it by making some sarcastic point about blacks possibly being racist in voting for Obama. That's the thing about Republicans. Often they make a perfectly rational point--and then ruin it with a stupid jab at Negroes or Latinos. I don't think they realize how much goodwill they lose with these antics. Anyway, the author worked on the Bradley campaign, and effectively kills the argument at its source.