Prometheus 6

...this was the state that gave you stonings of school buses during desegregation, the spearing of a black man in front of Boston City Hall, old-boy white boardrooms that scared off black talent, a Red Sox franchise that allowed the exclusion of black players from spring training dinners well into the 1980s, and a Boston Latin where white parents ended affirmative action at the city's flagship public high school less than 10 years ago.

That's why I must remind him of the 1989 Dinkins vs. Giuliani election. This is from the NY Times archives...sorry, but you'd have to have that TimesSelect thing to read it all.

In New York, polls made public the day before the mayoral election gave David N. Dinkins leads of 14 percentage points (by The Daily News with WABC-TV) to 18 points (by The New York Observer). His actual margin of victory over Rudolph W. Giuliani was about 2 percentage points. Shifting Numbers...

Larry Sabato, a political scientist at the University of Virginia, attributed the discrepancy to white voters who were reluctant to tell poll takers they were not voting for a black candidate, even under the cover of anonymity. ''Whites tell pollsters ahead of time that they are voting for the black candidate,'' he said, ''and then they go into the voting booth and can't quite pull down that lever.'' Dealing in Black and White

Other poll takers agree that some respondents are not candid about their racial attitudes when questioned in person or on the telephone. Two recent studies, by CBS News and The Washington Post, indicated that even the race of the person conducting the interview can affect the results. 

Sweeping race out the door
September 16, 2006

FORTY YEARS after Edward Brooke was elected to represent Massachusetts in the US Senate, the Commonwealth is close to claiming a partial healing of its soul. It does not matter if Deval Patrick wins the Democratic gubernatorial primary next week. It is a colossal triumph for the race to get this far without Patrick's darkness becoming a shroud.

After all, in the 40 years in between, this was the state that gave you stonings of school buses during desegregation, the spearing of a black man in front of Boston City Hall, old-boy white boardrooms that scared off black talent, a Red Sox franchise that allowed the exclusion of black players from spring training dinners well into the 1980s, and a Boston Latin where white parents ended affirmative action at the city's flagship public high school less than 10 years ago. With those historical snapshots, an outsider could remark that it is amazing that Patrick is even in the race, let alone leading it as of this writing.

In years past, it was always assumed that the polls always lied by several percentage points when it came to black candidates in elections where victory depended on wooing white voters.

On Tuesday, a poll of likely Democratic primary voters by CBS4 News found that Patrick had moved into the first significant lead of anyone in the race, with 45 percent support, compared with Chris Gabrieli at 29 percent and Thomas Reilly at 21 percent. It is no surprise that Patrick would have 67 percent support of black voters and 49 percent backing of Latino voters. Most important , he had 43 percent of white voters.

That defies any margin of racial lying to pollsters.