A comment from a statistics professor (not my Dad):
"My take on this is that African American voters will vote for Obama in greater numbers than the polls indicated and that will be called "the Obama" effect. Not an unreasonable prediction: AA's as a group have less respect for authority or what they see as "white" systems - (the pollsters, the elections) - and have been known to react as a group in surprising ways that can only be understood by recognizing AA's acute awareness of the unfairness in our society towards minorities. (Response to the OJ verdict comes to mind.)"Right now Obama is polling at 89% among black voters according to Gallop, so for the Obama effect to be real he'd need to see something on the order of 93% of the black vote. That's not much room for movement. Of course another way to measure an Obama effect would be to see if there's been an unusual increase in black voter registration since he won the nomination and of those voters if they overwhelmingly break for Obama. Polls have a notoriously difficult time accounting for new voters, so this is another area worth exploring.
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