This is rich…

MD-SEN: Was GOPer Steele Hit By "White Lie" In Polls?

An interesting postscript on the Maryland Senate race: Exit polls suggest that the "white lie" phenomenon, in which more white voters tell pollsters that they’ll vote for the black candidate than actually go through with it in the end, may have helped doom black Senate candidate Michael Steele. This is a phenomenon more often noted against Dems, of course, since African-American candidates are Democrats much more often than they’re Republican, but in this case, it may have harmed GOPer Steele as well.

Steele lost by 10 points — a higher spread than some pre-election polls suggested. Exit polls show that white voters split their vote evenly between Cardin and Steele, well short of the percentage of whites that ordinarily back the GOP candidate in seriously contested races in Maryland. In pre-election polls, meanwhile, respondents were promising to vote for Steele at a higher rate: a Baltimore Sun poll from five days before the election had Steele leading Cardin among whites by seven points. So the Republican candidate may have been victimized by the "white lie" after all.

You know who else suffers from this phenomenon?  Right…

Polls undercount support for same-sex marriage ban
Measures on 5 state ballots likely to pass despite survey results

…most of the measures on the Nov. 7 ballot in eight other states already have strong voter support. In fact, they may be even farther ahead than they appear, because polling on the issue has been consistently and inexplicably inaccurate.

Same-sex marriage ban supporters and opponents agree that pre-election polls often undercount support for the measures.

…

Polls that underestimated support for the bans were off by as much as 19 percentage points in North Dakota and 7 to 16 percentage points in six other states.

"What it means is that if history is any guide, which I think it is, you have to subtract at least four percentage points from pre-election polls to get a more accurate reading of what the results are going to be on election day," said Matt Foreman, executive director of the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force, a gay rights group working in opposition to the amendments.

Bans are expected to pass Nov. 7 in Idaho, Virginia, South Carolina, South Dakota and Tennessee. The races still appear close in Colorado, Arizona and Wisconsin.

…

Ban supporters also account for the consistent polling error in their strategies.

"We’ve seen it, I think, in every single case, that it is underpolled every single time," said Tom McClusky, vice president of government affairs at the conservative Family Research Council. "I’ve seen higher, but normally we would add 5 to 10 percentage points to any polling."

Gay rights supporters blame people’s unwillingness to express an anti-gay opinion to a pollster for the discrepancy between polls and the ballot box…

This is why we lost in Wisconsin and South Dakota, even though the polls said we could probably win.  Arizona actually surprised me.  I guess people are more honest about their opinion of gay people there.  But this is something I’ve seen time after time, and not just regarding same sex marriage.  When Anita Bryant went on her anti-gay crusade to repeal Dade County’s anti-discrimination law, the polls showed the race was close.  It wasn’t even.  The vote went against gay people by about four to one.

Call it, the Guilty Conscience effect.  People know discrimination is wrong.  Why else would you see so many cheap rationalizations for it?  Gay people aren’t being discriminated against by the marriage laws…they have the same right to marry a person of the opposite sex anyone else does…  And it’s surprisingly uncynical.  In years of arguing online with bigots, I keep running into this dogged insistence that as long as someone has an excuse to discriminate, no matter how pathetically lame it is, they’re not really discriminating.  I am not a bigot…I’m very sorry you feel you’re being treated unfairly…but my flimsy rationalizations serve to excuse me from any and all blame for the unfairness of your situation…not that I am admitting that it’s unfair…not that I would ever admit to being a bigot…I am a Good Person…  And so on…   It isn’t prejudice, if you say you don’t mean it.

Some years ago, shortly after I started working up here in Baltimore, I was talking to a group of co-workers about the upcoming elections.  It was 1992, and Alan Keyes was running against Barbra Mikulski.  It was his second try at becoming a senator from Maryland, and that year and in that workplace of mine, sentiment was running high against democrats.  These were mostly all blue collar folks where I was working then. Though I worked mostly with the managers, most of them had worked up the ranks from the field technicians they now managed.  Baltimore blue collar folks through and through.  And all of them white males. 

This particular group of them were ranting that day, on and on about how much they didn’t like Mikulski.  Mikulski was too liberal.  Mikulski was too democrat.  On and on it went.  I was amazed and appalled at how thoroughly the republican Mighty Wurlitzer had turned what had to have been at one point a bunch of solid blue collar union democrats into republican voters.  After several minutes of Mikulski bashing one of them asked me what I thought of her.  By then Alan Keyes had his own reputation in the state for being a pure to the bone nutcase.  So I shrugged my shoulders and said, Well…there’s always Keyes."  They looked at me…a group of about a half dozen or so white middle aged, blue collar guys, and one of them finally said, "You really play dirty don’t you?"  But he was grinning.  The rest of them were all shaking their heads and grinning ruefully.  Then I realized.  What I thought I was asking them was, "Okay…but would you vote for a nutcase?"  What they heard was "Okay, but would you vote for a black man?"  Keyes never had a chance with them, no matter how much Limbaugh managed to make them hate liberals and democrats. 

I thought about that all during this campaign here in Maryland, whenever the polls said that Steele was either winning, or close to it.  All I had to do was stroll around my neighborhood and look at all the GOVERNOR EHRLICH signs in the yards, and not a single STEELE sign among them.  But if it was racism that killed Steele’s chances among the Limbaugh republicans here, let it be said that he wasn’t above playing the race card himself.  During the 2002 campaign, as Ehrlich’s running mate, Steele was asked if he supported adding sexual orientation to Maryland’s anti-discrimination laws.  He instantly responded that there were already plenty of laws on the books protecting gay white men from discrimination. 

Dig it.  He took a question about gay rights, and turned it into a matter of race; of privileged white faggots riding on the coattails of the black civil rights movement.  That’s straight out of the republican play book.  I’d figured that Steele held the same cheapshit prejudices toward gay people Ehrlich did, or else Ehrlich wouldn’t have brought him onto the ticket.  What I saw then was that he was just as big a race baiting thug as any other republican in the state. 

And it came back to bite him in the ass.  Welcome back to the world of the suspect classes Michael.  You might have thought that being accepted into the republican machine was your ticket out of all that.  It wasn’t.