Insiders V. Outsiders View of Elections

There was a really interesting piece on NPR’s On the Media yesterday about “The Bradley Effect.” The interesting thing about the show is that it not only has good data presented about the effect (see link above).  The other aspect I found fascinating was that the cammpaigns both knew pretty quickly that the dynamics of the election were such that it was not surprising to them that Bradley lost.  The moral to the story here is that campaigns often know more than the rest of us about “unexpected outcomes”.  This came up in 2002 when certain people claimed election fraud in Georgia’s gubernatoral and senatoral races and the Democratic campaign managers were having to refute the claims and argue that their candidates lost fair and square.