MD-SEN: Was GOPer Steele Hit By "White Lie" In Polls?
An interesting postscript on the Maryland Senate race: Exit polls suggest that the "white lie" phenomenon, in which more white voters tell pollsters that they'll vote for the black candidate than actually go through with it in the end, may have helped doom black Senate candidate Michael Steele. This is a phenomenon more often noted against Dems, of course, since African-American candidates are Democrats much more often than they're Republican, but in this case, it may have harmed GOPer Steele as well.
Steele lost by 10 points — a higher spread than some pre-election polls suggested. Exit polls show that white voters split their vote evenly between Cardin and Steele, well short of the percentage of whites that ordinarily back the GOP candidate in seriously contested races in Maryland. In pre-election polls, meanwhile, respondents were promising to vote for Steele at a higher rate: a Baltimore Sun poll from five days before the election had Steele leading Cardin among whites by seven points. So the Republican candidate may have been victimized by the "white lie" after all.
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