Politico: It was guns, not race, that affected Bradley

In the run-up to election day, mainstream media pundit and mainstream media fretted about various theories about how the election could be stolen from Barack Obama. One of the most common fears was a related to a lurking racism that was not showing up in the polls.

But The Politico's Joe Mathews did his homework, and posted his findings Tuesday morning.

Turns out it wasn't racism that turned voters off to Tom Bradley's 1982 campaign for California governor...it was guns.

From the story:

Nelson Rising, chairman of Tom Bradley’s 1982 campaign for California governor, still remembers the phone call. Bradley called him shortly after 4 a.m. on a long Election Night, when it was clear Bradley had lost to Republican George Deukmejian.

“You were right,” Bradley told Rising a bit wearily.

With those words, Bradley, the Democratic mayor of Los Angeles, acknowledged that a political mistake had cost him the governorship. And, despite all the theories that the election produced a “Bradley effect” that could hurt black candidates such as Bradley — and, a quarter-century later, Democratic presidential nominee Barack Obama — the mayor himself knew his loss had little to do with race or polls.

The main problem was guns. Against Rising’s advice, Bradley had endorsed Proposition 15, a statewide ballot initiative that would have put a freeze on purchases of new guns. Bradley and Proposition 15 both had a lead in the polls when Bradley decided to back the initiative. But there was a huge backlash against Proposition 15 in inland, conservative California precincts. The resulting turnout was so overwhelming that it took down Bradley — just as Rising had predicted in a campaign meeting months earlier.

“I will never forget that meeting,” Rising is quoted as saying. “I said, ‘I don’t own a gun. I don’t intend to own a gun. If I could design a world without guns, I would. But Tom, if you support this, you can’t win.’”

Again, from the story:

Over the past few weeks, I examined polling and news stories from the 1982 race and talked with dozens of major players in the Bradley and Deukmejian campaigns. There is no independent data or evidence that suggests that race decided the election, a fate many have suggested could befall Obama. And only two survivors of that campaign expressed any belief in the idea that the 1982 California governor’s race saw a Bradley effect — a racist vote that was concealed from pollsters. And even those two campaign workers, former Bradley aides Phil Depoian and Bill Elkins, say that, without Proposition 15, Bradley almost certainly would have won anyway.

In the aftermath of the 2008 Presidential race, it is clear that the difference between Bradley's 1982 gubernatorial contest and Obama's presidential run twenty-six years later is that Tom Bradley was honest with voters about his support for gun control, while Barack Obama was entirely dishonest about his.