McCain wins?

In this article by the Chicago Tribune, an editorial writer gives us reasons why Obama might not win on Tuesday. As was mentioned in a previous blog post, this is uncharacteristic for the media to portray Obama in a bad light, usually he seems to do no wrong in the media's eyes. However, the last reason was especially surprisingly. I was surprised that a newspaper would admit that this is even a factor for fear of ridicule, but to be honest this has happened before. It is called the "Bradley Effect," named after Tom Bradley, an African American who ran for California governor twice and lost. It is defined as "a tendency of voters to tell interviewers or pollsters that they are undecided or likely to vote for an African American candidate, but then actually vote for his Caucasian opponent," according to Wikipedia. Bradley was predicted to win by a large margin, but actually lost by quite a large margin. If this happened before, could it happen again? The media perpetuates the idea that Obama will win, because they hardly ever print negative things about him, so it isn't hard to see why some people might feel like they would be alienated if they admitted to liking McCain. It makes me wonder if the media telling us that Obama is going to win will actually lull his supporters into a false sense of security. They may think the work is done and that his win will be easy, but in fact it might not. This could be blamed on the media, and it would be terrible if this false sense of security hurt him on Tuesday.