Sen. Barack Obama, the first black presidential candidate from a major political party, will not be affected by the Bradley effect during today’s election, according to political scientist Andra Gillespie.

The Bradley effect is often cited to explain discrepancies between voter opinion polls and the election results at races in which a white and non-white candidate run against each other.

The Bradley effect states that voters will report to be in favor of the non-white candidate in an effort to appear without prejudice.

However, once in the voting booth, these people actually tend to vote in favor of the white candidate, thus creating a gap between election predictions and the actual results.

Gillespie said that the Bradley effect will not play a role in this election due in part to the change in American attitudes toward race as well as Americans’ increased honesty in reporting private information to pollsters.

“A line of research has been done of late that says that the Bradley effect dissipated in the mid-1990s,” Gillespie said. “What [researchers] found was that after the mid-1990s, the black candidates were not underperforming in their poll numbers.”

Gillespie said that the Bradley effect was most prominent in the 1980s when people were “less tolerant of having a black person in a position of leadership.”

“While there is certainly still a lot of prejudice in our society, the diversity of our country has increased and the country is younger with attitudes and prejudices that are different from a generation ago,” Gillespie said in a recent press release. “And ultimately in this race, economics trumps prejudice.”

The Bradley effect was cited during the New Hampshire primary when polls showed a lead for Obama, but election results ultimately determined a loss to Sen. Hillary Clinton.

Gillespie attributes this discrepancy to incorrect polling that produced biased results.

“It’s also important to remember that polls are ultimately a snapshot in time and may not reflect what people are thinking today,” Gillespie said in the press release.

Gillespie said that people are now more honest in expressing their true feelings to pollsters and generally are more comfortable with the medium of polling.

While Gillespie said that increased racial tolerance has helped to decrease or even eliminate the Bradley effect, she acknowledges that there is always an “outside chance” that the Bradley effect could play a role in the election.

“There’s always a chance that people are going to lie in polls,” she added.

Although the Bradley effect could surface during this election, Gillespie said that every possibility needs to be considered to explain underperformance, or any major discrepancies between the poll numbers and the actual results.

“Just because there is no Bradley effect, that doesn’t mean there won’t be any tightening,” Gillespie said. “Unless we can prove that it was white undecided that were deliberately lying about their preferences, we can’t assume that the underperformance on Obama’s part is automatically the Bradley effect.”

The Bradley effect was named after Tom Bradley, a black politican who lost the race for the California Governership in 1982 despite his lead in voter polls prior to the election.

—Contact Kate Borger.