This paper compiles polling and election data for all black and female candidates for Governor or U.S. Senator from 1989 to 2006. These 249 observations from 133 elections show that

there was indeed a Wilder effect, but one that was specific to a particular group and political context. African Americans running for office before 1996 performed on average 2.7 percentage points worse than their polling numbers would indicate. Yet this effect subsequently disappeared. Although precision is limited because there were only 47 observations for 18 elections with black candidates in this period, these findings accord with theories of racial politics emphasizing the information environment. As racialized rhetoric about welfare and crime receded from national prominence in the mid-1990s, so did the gap between polling and performance. Even over short periods of time, the inuence of race on electoral politics can shift markedly.

Now, I really hope Hopkins is correct, for a variety of reasons.*  Here's my question, however -- does evidence of a disappearing Bradley effect in state-level elections automatically imply that it has disappeared at the presidential level?**  

This is a genuine question -- I really don't know.  I can see valid reasons for saying that polling effects at the senatorial and gubernatorial level would translate to the presidential level.  On the other hand, this is the first time an African-American has appeared this high up on their ballot; I have to wonder if the Bradley effect is most powerful the first time an African-American runs for a particular office.  On the fourth hand, the Bradley effect is not the same thing as racism (I think it's pretty clear that the latter effect hasn't gone away) -- and I don't have a good answer for why the Bradley Effect would disappear at lower-level elections and not at the highest tier.

In other words, I don't know.  This seems like an excellent question to throw open to comments, however.

*The most obvious thing is that the more closely final results hew to exit polls, the fewer conspiracy theories that float around after the election. 

**Hopkins has data from the 2008 primary that says yes, but let's face it, Barack Obama vs. Hillary Clinton is not the same thing as Barack Obama vs. John McCain. 

1. John McCain looks much worse in person than he does on analog television, and I was wondering if that would show up if 2008 would lead to an HD/analog split in reaction to the debate that 1960 had for radio/television.  I was pleasantly surprised to see that the answer was no.  [Pleasantly?--ed.  Yes, this is a really stupid reason to prefer one candidate over the other.]  McCain looked better than expected, while Obama looked more sallow.  Curiously, the more whiskey I drank, the better both of them looked.  UPDATE:  Wow, Ann Althouse and I agree!
2. Ah, the perceived slights.  Josh Marshall highlights McCain's unwillingness to make eye contact with Obama.  I would say that McCain evinced some disregard for Obama -- but I'm not buying the "low-ranking monkey" hypothesis (seriously, I can't believe Josh posted this).  McCain was not afraid of Obama -- he just doesn't like him.
3. Meanwhile, Amy Holmes at NRO is miffed that Obama kept calling John McCain "John" rather than Senator McCain.  Holmes suggests that Obama picked this up from Joe Biden.  I've found, in talking with Obama staffers, that this is just how that campaign talks.  They all call Obama "Barack".  The fuddy-duddy in me finds this absurd -- if you're worried about a stature/experience gap with your opponent, the last thing you do is call everyone by their first name.  But it's not something directed at McCain specifically.
4. The most grating moment came when John McCain called himself a maverick.  As Megan McArdle observes, "no one should ever, ever refer to themselves as a maverick unless they are currently James Garner." 
5. Amid all the debate over who won the debate, the answer seems clear to me -- the candidate who left themselves more vulnerable to the cold-open Saturday Night Live skit tonight loses.  I think McCain's performance is more ripe for satire -- but we'll know in about 14 hours.   

• The initial Treasury plan for the financial crisis was so absurdly short and vague that it was a no-go from the start;
• The House GOP proposals to deal with the mess are, according to sympathetic conservatives, not realistic.  According to other observers, they're f#$king ridiculous.  Ed Rollins thinks they're putting party over country.  As Hugh Hewitt points out, "intransigence in the minority during a crisis is nothing except a suicidal indifference to both the economic emergency and the reality of the possibility of panic."  
• The former House Speaker is urging the current GOP caucus in the House to stand firm on the ridiculous proposal. 
• The current GOP nominee has careened every which way on the financial mess in the past two weeks.  He then "suspends" his campaign to help solve the problem in DC, urging his Democratic counterpart to postpone the debates.  After doing nothing of substance, he then reverses his position and agrees to debate tonight. 
• The current VP candidate is so incoherent in her press interviews that the most sympathetic explanation for her behavior is that she knows she's out of her league. 

• She's a hockey mom
• She has less than two years of experience as governor
• She has yet to utter a coherent sentence on foreign policy

1. The ad implies that Obama's willing to give out loan guarantees to Detroit.  Question to Obama's economic team -- are there any industries you are not going to offer a federal handout?  And no, oil doesn't count. 
2. My Democrat friends keep insisting that Obama doesn't mean any of his protectionist rhetoric.  But how many ads about "shipping jobs overseas" does it take for one to wonder about Obama's foreign economic policy? 
3. This ad actually brings up one of the few actual "straight talk" moments for McCain in this campaign -- when he told Michigan auto workers that he wasn't going to be able to bring their jobs back. 
4. One of the side benefits of the widening number of swing states is that the rust belt starts to matter less.  Which means that maybe in another election cycle or two protectionist pandering like this becomes less necessary [You're dreaming, you know that, right?--ed.  Oh, let me have this fantasy.]

On fixing the economy:  “Through reform, absolutely.  Look at the oversight that has been lack, I believe, here at the 1930s type of regulatory regime overseeing some of these corporations.  And we’ve got to get a more coordinated and a much more stringent oversight regime…government can play a very, very appropriate role in the oversight as people are trusting these companies with their life savings, with their investments, with their insurance policies, and construction bonds, and everything else."  On who is responsible for the failing financial institutions:  “I think the corruption on Wall Street.  That’s to blame.  And that violation of the public trust.  And that contract that should be inherent in corporations who are spending, investing other people’s money, the abuse of that is what has got to stop. “And it’s a matter, too, of some of these CEOs and top management people, and shareholders too not holding that management accountable, being addicted to, we call it, OPM, O-P-M, “other people’s money.” “Spending that, investing that, not using the prudence that we expect of them.  But here again, government has got to play an appropriate role in the stringent oversight, making sure that those abuses stop.” On AIG getting government bailout:  “Well, you know, first, Fannie and Freddie, different because quasi-government agencies there where government had to step in because of the adverse impacts all across our nation, especially with homeowners. “It’s just too impacting, we had to step in there.  I do not like the idea though of taxpayers being used to bailout these corporations.  Today it was AIG, important call there, though, because of the construction bonds and the insurance carrier duties of AIG.”

Conservatism was once a frankly elitist movement. Conservatives stood against radical egalitarianism and the destruction of rigorous standards. They stood up for classical education, hard-earned knowledge, experience and prudence. Wisdom was acquired through immersion in the best that has been thought and said. But, especially in America, there has always been a separate, populist, strain. For those in this school, book knowledge is suspect but practical knowledge is respected. The city is corrupting and the universities are kindergartens for overeducated fools. The elitists favor sophistication, but the common-sense folk favor simplicity. The elitists favor deliberation, but the populists favor instinct.... I would have more sympathy for this view if I hadn’t just lived through the last eight years. For if the Bush administration was anything, it was the anti-establishment attitude put into executive practice. And the problem with this attitude is that, especially in his first term, it made Bush inept at governance. It turns out that governance, the creation and execution of policy, is hard. It requires acquired skills. Most of all, it requires prudence.

[A]a series of new experiments show that misinformation can exercise a ghostly influence on people's minds after it has been debunked -- even among people who recognize it as misinformation. In some cases, correcting misinformation serves to increase the power of bad information. In experiments conducted by political scientist John Bullock at Yale University, volunteers were given various items of political misinformation from real life. One group of volunteers was shown a transcript of an ad created by NARAL Pro-Choice America that accused John G. Roberts Jr., President Bush's nominee to the Supreme Court at the time, of "supporting violent fringe groups and a convicted clinic bomber." A variety of psychological experiments have shown that political misinformation primarily works by feeding into people's preexisting views. People who did not like Roberts to begin with, then, ought to have been most receptive to the damaging allegation, and this is exactly what Bullock found. Democrats were far more likely than Republicans to disapprove of Roberts after hearing the allegation. Bullock then showed volunteers a refutation of the ad by abortion-rights supporters. He also told the volunteers that the advocacy group had withdrawn the ad. Although 56 percent of Democrats had originally disapproved of Roberts before hearing the misinformation, 80 percent of Democrats disapproved of the Supreme Court nominee afterward. Upon hearing the refutation, Democratic disapproval of Roberts dropped only to 72 percent. Republican disapproval of Roberts rose after hearing the misinformation but vanished upon hearing the correct information. The damaging charge, in other words, continued to have an effect even after it was debunked among precisely those people predisposed to buy the bad information in the first place.... Political scientists Brendan Nyhan and Jason Reifler provided two groups of volunteers with the Bush administration's prewar claims that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. One group was given a refutation -- the comprehensive 2004 Duelfer report that concluded that Iraq did not have weapons of mass destruction before the United States invaded in 2003. Thirty-four percent of conservatives told only about the Bush administration's claims thought Iraq had hidden or destroyed its weapons before the U.S. invasion, but 64 percent of conservatives who heard both claim and refutation thought that Iraq really did have the weapons. The refutation, in other words, made the misinformation worse. A similar "backfire effect" also influenced conservatives told about Bush administration assertions that tax cuts increase federal revenue. One group was offered a refutation by prominent economists that included current and former Bush administration officials. About 35 percent of conservatives told about the Bush claim believed it; 67 percent of those provided with both assertion and refutation believed that tax cuts increase revenue.

• The Obama strategy of painting McCain as a liar won't improve perceptions of Obama -- at best they'll simply convince people McCain is a liar.
• There is a terrible incentive for any "expert" -- i.e., credentialed enough to merit press attention -- to make a wild-ass claim that makes the papers.  Since the first claimer apparently has first-mover advantage, refutation becomes irrelevant. 
• No one gives a flying f%$# what I think about this. 

If McCain wins, he'll face a Democratic congress that's beyond furious. Losing is one thing, but after eight years of George Bush and Karl Rove, losing a vicious campaign like this one will cause Dems to go berserk. They won't even return McCain's phone calls, let alone work with him on legislation. It'll be four years of all-out war. And what if Obama wins? The last time a Democrat won after a resurgence of the culture war right, we got eight years of madness, climaxing in an impeachment spectacle unlike anything we'd seen in a century. If it happens again, with the lunatic brigade newly empowered and shrieking for blood, Obama will be another Clinton and we'll be in for another eight years of near psychotic dementia. Am I exaggerating? Sure. Am I exaggerating a lot? I don't think so. McCain, in his overwhelming desire for office, is unloosing forces that are likely to make the country only barely governable no matter who wins. 

1. Here's a fun counterfactual:  step back for a minute and think about what would be happening right now if John Snow was still the Treasury Secretary instead of Henry Paulson.  That's a scary f$#&ing thought, isn't it?  For someone who ostensibly accepted the job during an administration's lame duck years, Paulson's been rather... vital, no?  If you were a conspiracy theorist -- which I'm not -- you'd almost have to wonder if Bush officials, when they approached Paulson, let him know that a financial storm was a brewin'. 
2. The effect on the presidential campaign seems obvious to me -- isn't it going to be very, very hard for the GOP to bash Obama as a big government liberal when a Republican administration takes over two of the largest financial institutions in the country with the support of the Republican candidate for president?  It's not like this is a completely new phenomenon, but still. 

• One the whole, it was a pretty flat speech -- not nearly as crisp as Palin's from last night.  McCain stepped on some of his lines, and whenever I thought he was building some momentum, the energy stalled out.  At times, towards the end, with the call for service, he seemed more like the grandfather who's allowed to prattle on at Thanksgiving dinner than a major-party candidate. 
• The reach out to Obama and his supporters seemed both graceful and savvy.  It also raised an interesting point.  Judging from the convention speeches, there's a surprising amount of overlap between the two:  striving for energy independence, focusing on education, using the best ideas from both parties, reaching out across the aisle, emphasizing public service... does Barack Obama disagree with any of this? 
• The mention of David Petraeus was a bit odd.  Mona Charen thinks it's telling that McCain mentioned him but none of the Democrats did.  I always thought that active military commanders shouldn't be mentioned at political conventions, period.  Readers, feel free to point out if I'm inventing a norm here. 
• I was grateful for the "Washington changed us" rhetoric, and a pledge to cut government spending.  Um... which government programs?  
• My favorite part of the speech was McCain's take on coping with the global economy.  It contained his only concrete proposal (reforming unemployment insurance) while also emphasizing their different takes on the global economy (Obama:  protect old industries; McCain:  prepare citizens for new industries).  If my vote was based only on foreign economic policy, I'd be voting for McCain and it wouldn't be a close call. 
• Here's a semi-deep thought.  McCain spent plenty of time bashing politicians and his opponents for acting in their self-interest, while he works for the national interest.  Here's the thing:  he knows that  the market economy largely operates according to the former principle and not the latter principle, right?