Undecided voters: Why they still aren’t sure

last updated 8 January 2015

Not since Jersey Shore, said Michelle Cottle in TheDailyBeast.com, have people of “such demonstrable ignorance been in such great demand.” I refer, of course, to the 4 to 6 percent of U.S. voters who even today, with the presidential election less than a month away, still say they’re “undecided.” With Obama and Romney now tied in the polls, the campaigns are both desperately spending millions trying to help these “utterly clueless” voters make up their minds. Undecideds, research has shown, don’t follow the news, and don’t watch debates, said Timothy Egan in NYTimes.com. They are chronic ditherers, the sort of idiots who “panic at ‘paper or plastic?’ in the supermarket, backing up the checkout line.” Yet upon them “rests the future of the republic.”

They didn’t ask to be the key to this election, said Ezra Klein in The Washington Post. For the most part, undecideds are what political scientists call “low-information voters”: People who simply aren’t interested in politics and only focus on the presidential race at the very end. This may seem like proof of a mental defect to those of us who follow politics obsessively, but a baseball fan would have the same impression of me if I confessed that I didn’t know who won last year’s World Series, which I don’t. What the poll data shows, said Daniel Trotta in Reuters.com, is that the typical undecided is a white female, lacks a college degree, and earns less than $25,000 a year. Many of these so-called “Walmart moms” care only about their own family budgets, not the federal deficit, and they aren’t particularly impressed with either President Obama or Mitt Romney.

If that’s why they’re undecided, said Jon Healey in the Los Angeles Times, then maybe we shouldn’t look down on them. Under Obama, the economy has been moribund, while Romney’s solution—lower taxes and less regulation—has failed in the very recent past. Neither candidate has provided evidence that he understands “the source of the economy’s problems and the right way to solve them.” I’m an undecided voter, said Rod Dreher in BBC.co.uk, not because I don’t think about the issues, but because I do. Weighing Obama’s lackluster record against Romney’s apparent intention “to be the third term of George W. Bush,” I find it very hard to choose—“because neither candidate is worthy of my vote.”