The Bradley Effect is named for former Los Angeles Mayor Tom Bradley, an African American. When he ran for governor of California in 1982, Bradley was leading in the polls on Election Day, but narrowly lost to Republican George Deukmejian.

Bill Roberts, Deukmejian’s campaign manager, had predicted that about 5 percent of voters who had told pollsters they would vote for Bradley would change their minds based on his race. Political scientists studying the Bradley Effect concluded that it was real—with a median gap of 3.1 percentage points in elections before 1996.

After Bradley’s loss, some other African American candidates who appeared to be leading were defeated, especially when their opponents played the race card, though several others narrowly won. The ultimate refutation of the Bradley Effect, of course, was Barack Obama’s election as president in 2008. Any late-breaking loss of white support was more than offset by a wave of Black turnout.

In the Trump era, with the president of the United States fomenting racial hatred, is the Bradley Effect alive and well?

We will get a test of this in three Senate races. In South Carolina, Democrat Jaime Harrison, who is African American, is giving an unexpectedly close challenge to incumbent Lindsey Graham. This is a state whose other senator, Tim Scott, is a Black Republican, so maybe South Carolina is less racist than it once was.

And in Georgia, which has been trending Democratic, in one contest Raphael Warnock, an African American pastor, is narrowly favored to win a seat held by Kelly Loeffler, who was appointed to fill a vacancy. In the other, Jon Ossoff, who is Jewish, is in a virtual tie with badly blemished incumbent David Perdue. (In some parts of Georgia, the word "Jew" is pronounced with two syllables, and anti-Semitism can have its own Bradley Effect.)

A further factor is that Biden’s running mate is Kamala Harris. Though Harris has not been highly visible lately, it may give some voters pause that a Black woman is in line to succeed a 77-year-old presumptive president.

In 2008, it appeared that America was at last moving beyond race. That proved premature. In 2020, the second best is a massive turnout of Black voters and other Americans of goodwill.