The Mysterious Case of the Undecided Vote
Political parties still don’t know who these voters are or how best to reach them.
Political parties and their allies spend billions of dollars every election cycle trying to positively shape public perceptions of their candidates and positions, negatively shape views of the opposition, highlight salient issues, and ultimately get out the vote each November. They hold big rallies, host local phone banks and door knocking operations, and throw out a barrage of glitzy television ads and clever online memes. They raise boat loads of cash to pay for all of this from small donors and big money people alike.
One would imagine that the bulk of this money would be highly targeted at persuading those who either aren’t sure about voting or haven’t yet made up their mind about which party and candidate to support. But that’s a big assumption that requires political parties: (1) know who these reluctant and undecided voters are and where they live; and (2) understand what motivates them in terms of political decision making, issue positions, and beliefs.
In practice, the bulk of party spending in elections does not underwrite a finely tuned political radar capable of identifying and pursuing the small percentage of truly persuadable voters. Rather, it pays for a fire hose of information and attacks indiscriminately sprayed on various local and state electorates without much, if any, understanding of who is seeing their partisan materials, how they are interpreting competing bits of information, and what ultimately will move undecided Americans to either vote or make up their mind. Even when political ads and messages are targeted online—or on radio and television—there’s a great deal of wishful thinking that party messages and attacks actually reach intended audiences, and more importantly, influence those people on digital platforms or watching particular programs who have yet to decide how they will vote.
American ingenuity has solved a lot of problems in the world and created amazing scientific and technological advancements to help all of humanity. Yet, somehow, we still can’t figure out undecided voters and how best to interact with them. It’s mostly a guess. Why?
There’s one obvious reason for this lack of understanding, and one more empirical reason.
First, voting is a private act and it’s really no one’s business how other people plan to vote in an election, if they plan to vote at all. So, parties must make guesses using inexact tools like polls, big data modeling, digital analysis, canvassing operations, and other local networking outreach to mark their base voters, find potential on-the-fence ones, and hopefully identify some new people to add in to the mix.
These methods are much better at identifying and targeting core partisan voters— who are happy to participate in the process and proclaim their preferences—than they are at finding more reluctant and undecided ones.
Second, extrapolating from these inexact methods, parties do have a pretty good understanding of what reluctant and undecided voters tend to look like demographically: they are generally younger with less formal education and income, they mostly don’t like or care about politics, and they hold idiosyncratic views on economic and social issues that don’t easily fit into traditional ideological and partisan models. But these analyses are still vague and don’t really give campaigns a concrete list of people or groups in specific areas to motivate and persuade.
So, lacking precise information, parties end up just blasting out ads and emails and slapping together messages hoping the content is solid and persuasive—and that someone, somewhere who is hesitant about their voting intention actually pays attention.
Current polling suggests that there is roughly a 5-6 percent undecided bloc in a matchup between Donald Trump and Kamala Harris that includes independent candidates, with a slightly larger pool of people who say they are open to possibly switching their current position or voting for a third-party candidate. Studies of these voters suggest they are mainly concerned about the economy and immigration, and favor Trump on these issues. Others express concern about abortion access and favor Harris by a wide margin on the issue.
As Aaron Zitner reports in The Wall Street Journal, the Trump campaign believes many persuadable voters in battleground states potentially lean their way:
The Trump campaign’s assessment is that persuadable voters are overwhelmingly men, particularly young men, said senior campaign advisers this past week. That is one reason Trump appeared recently on an array of social-media platforms that appeal to young men. He recently joined a livestream with the internet personality Adin Ross. Before that, Trump appeared in a video with the golfer Bryson DeChambeau, which racked up more than 10 million views and for a time was the top-trending video on YouTube.
Trump’s allies are also teaming up with the pranksters and podcasters known as the Nelk Boys on a voter registration and turnout drive aimed at young men.
“It’s a very narrow band of people we are trying to move,” a senior campaign official said.
In comparison, Harris’s operation is only a few weeks old but surmises that her biggest challenges lie with people who were reluctant to back Biden because of his age but don’t know much about her, and also with those who continue to doubt the policy choices of the Biden-Harris administration, particularly on the economy. Early advertising and speechmaking has therefore sought to present Harris to disengaged voters in a compelling manner that lets them know her own values and beliefs and outlines how she plans to address their specific concerns on issues like inflation and the border.
Both of these campaign approaches to undecided voters make some intuitive sense.
Yet, what if both campaigns are off the mark in their interpretations of who they should be courting and for what reasons? Perhaps Trump needs to focus less on young men and more on middle-aged women who don’t particularly like him but are also uncertain about Harris. Perhaps Harris needs to focus less on “abortion and democracy” voters in the suburbs who thought Biden was too old and more on working-class voters in both cities and small towns who are displeased with inflation and their personal finances.
Time is dwindling for both campaigns to get this right—and there’s no clear answer from existing research and campaign tools about who persuadable voters in 2024 really are, where they live, how they get their information, and what precisely they think about the issues and the candidates.
Unfortunately, the Trump and Harris teams are operating mostly on instinct when it comes to identifying and persuading reluctant and undecided voters to move their way.
Even in our advanced democratic and capitalist society, politics remains more like water dowsing than exact science.
What is “unfortunate” is not the difficulty that the campaigns are having in “selling” their candidates to voters, but rather the extreme positions and character defects of their candidates. For all of the whining that Republicans do about taxes and high prices, and all the whining that Democrats do about “inequality,” and the “need” for all sorts of more government programs, think of what else might be accomplished with the billions wasted on political advertising (and commercial advertising too).
Although it is not true this year, I am often among the ranks of the "undecided voter" at this stage of an election (and, sometimes, right up to election day). I am, perhaps (in fact, likely) an outlier but I don't fit the demographic that either you or the campaigns hypothesize; and my reasoning is probably something that you might expect but that neither of the campaigns would (and certainly not what the campaigns desire).
This year, I will certainly vote for Harris/Walz. Or, perhaps not. It depends on how tight the race is in my state (NH) when we get to election day. I want to make sure that Trump doesn't win. But, if it is clear that Harris/Walz will prevail here despite whatever I may do, then I will cast a protest vote for some candidate that isn't from one of the two major parties.
Because, when it comes down to it, a vote for Harris/Walz will feel like voting for the one who will kill me more slowly -- or, in Charlie Sykes' formulation, like voting for the Cancer in order to avoid the Heart Attack.
I could comfortably have voted for a centrist Democrat (or a centrist Republican). I am loathe to cast a vote that encourages the progressive left (or the regressive right) in thinking that they have a mandate to remake the country in their image. Alas, that is how either side will interpret victory by even the smallest of margins. Both sides seem to think we are electing a King, not a President...
I have written a couple of times in the past about the plight of the undecided voter, as letters to the editor and in response to editorialists who have heaped scorn upon us as if we were imbeciles rather than in despair.
from November 2000
Recent letters and columns have treated undecided voters as pariahs, either too stupid or too lazy to figure out what they want or what the country needs. The letters and columns are not only disrespectful, they are wrong. Undecided voters know what they want and what the country needs; they just can’t find it in any of the candidates. They are not holding out waiting for gotchas or flourishes. They are not even waiting for a white knight to ride in and save the day. They are merely putting off an unpleasant chore, hoping against hope that one of the candidates will finally make a mistake and give them some clue as to which version of the truth about themselves and about their parties they actually believe.
And is that so bad? If everyone declared themselves “undecided” right up until election day, the candidates would be forced to keep talking to them instead of writing them off as either a “safe vote” or a “lost cause”.
from October 2012
For quite some time I have been enduring, without comment, the disdain, and downright vitriol, being heaped upon undecided voters. But your editorial cartoon today, depicting such voters as diners in a restaurant who have overstayed their welcome while the staff just wants to go home, was simply too far over the top to let it pass.
For the record: If I have to choose between shooting myself in the head or in the heart, can I be blamed for wanting to put off the pain for as long as possible?
But that aside, the election hasn’t been held yet! The fact that the 6-year-olds of the press can’t contain their curiosity doesn’t give them a right to my opinion or a right to force my choice!
If I was standing in the voting booth at 9 pm on election day holding up the counting, they would have a good reason to complain and I would deserve their scorn. But complaining now, in the middle of the evening rush, that I haven’t yet bothered to place my order is just childish petulance. Hey, you in the media! I don’t really care how tired you are. It’s not time to go home yet!
-apl