KEY POINTS:
NEW YORK - People lie about sex - not politics.
That is the view of America's gold-standard, pollster, the Gallup organization which has been measuring human behavior and thoughts for 70 years.
If you believe the avalanche of results in this most polled of US elections, you might
say, eleven days out from election day, the cake is baked.
Barack Obama certainly looks on track to become America's first black President . There is despondency and rage within the ruling Republican Party and the campaign of it's flag bearer, John McCain ; Gallup has Obama leading McCain by a full five percentage points.
But are the polls correct? Gallup editor Frank Newport thinks so. He told the Boston Herald newspaper on Thursday: "If you're asking how often people have sex, there is some lying involved." Newport added that the pollster had uncovered no evidence thus far that people were lying about their voting intentions.
Others are far from convinced. There is a history in America of people being untruthful to pollsters when asked about their voting intentions when a leading candidate is black. The phenomenon is known as the Bradley effect. It took shape in 1982 when the former black Mayor of Los Angeles, Tom Bradley, unexpectedly lost his bid to become Governor of California despite the polls giving him a clear victory over his white opponent. Seven years on it resurfaced when a black man, Doug Wilder, only very narrowly won the vote to become Virginia's Governor, despite the polls predicting a landslide victory for him.
Those who believe in the potency of the Bradley effect - debate on its existence still rages among political scientists - say people lie to pollsters about their support for black candidates because they do not wish to appear racist. The concern about the Bradley effect is of course more acute this Presidential election because America has never before had a leading black candidate. And it was heightened a couple of weeks ago when some researchers predicted that Bradley effect could cost Obama six percentage points. An effect of that magnitude would wipe out his lead over John McCain.
We won't know until election day what, if any , impact the Bradley effect will have.
But there was an ominous pointer yesterday in the New York Times . In its latest poll, The Times, discovered that a third of voters it surveyed knew somebody who would not vote for Obama just because his is black.