The Unknowability of the Undecided Voter

How does one start a story about the undecided voter in 2024? Every decided voter is alike; every undecided voter is undecided in his own way . . . We are talking now of summer evenings in Mechanicsburg, Pennsylvania, in the time that the undecided voter lived there so successfully disguised to himself as a Republican child . . .

For months, I have heard breathless talk about the undecided voter, gossipped and theorized about them with my friends, but I still have no idea how to commit them to the page as anything other than a largely undefined and mysterious entity: a percentage in the polls—somewhere between three per cent nationwide, and up to fifteen per cent in swing states, depending on whichever pollster you trust—or respondents in the latest focus group. After debates, they are dragged in front of cameras to deliver sober assessments about how the night's performances swayed their decision in one way or another. (The verdicts, more often than not, involve slight shifts in the way the voter is "leaning" and give off the image of the voter as a passive drunk swaying in the back of the bar while watching the action.) These testimonials, of course, are performances in themselves. Half of them feel like they're being delivered by former theatre kids who have realized that being an undecided voter in Scranton will get them air time on CNN; the other half feel like they were recorded at some secret C.I.A. site in the coup-happy nineteen-eighties.

There's a conception of the undecided voter as someone who sits squarely in the middle of today's polarized politics and has weighed both sides' policy options in a rational way and just needs a little more time or information to figure out which way to lean. If you want to attach an image to them in the most well-worn way possible, picture a mom in suburban Philadelphia who believes in abortion rights but might be concerned about too much wokeism in her child's school, or perhaps an industrial worker in Michigan who has always voted Republican but has grown tired of Donald Trump 's grotesque antics and just needs a little reassurance that Kamala Harris will not turn the country into a Communist hellscape. But if these focus groups and interviews prove anything, they show that the undecideds generally do not conform to this centrist fantasy and are, in fact, all over the place. A panel of undecided voters who talked to the Times after the debate, for example, seemed more like theatre critics pleading for a performance with more substance. "Trump and Kamala both seem built on vibes, and both are succeeding," Mark, a twenty-four-year-old chef from California, said. "It's made me pessimistic about the future. I don't think it's going to be serious people who are running the country." Cameron Lewellen, a Black father of three from Georgia who voted for Trump in 2016 and Biden in 2020, told NPR that he was offended by Trump's statements about Harris's ethnicity and was concerned that the former President had offered no contrition about January 6th . He had gone into the debate, he said, leaning toward Trump, but now he was leaning toward Harris.

Most responsible people know not to make too much of these individual opinions. They have been produced as part of a television show, and they, as a result, are optimized for entertainment and emotion. But the alternatives in print media haven't been much more clarifying. "How can millions of voters still be undecided between Trump and Harris?" Doyle McManus of the Los Angeles Times asked this past Monday. "Here are their reasons." (The list, according to McManus, includes people concerned about the economy, so-called double haters who dislike Harris and Trump, and low-information voters who just haven't tuned in yet.) Ross Douthat, a conservative columnist at the Times, took a slightly more measured approach, speculating " What Undecided Voters Might Be Thinking ," and arguing that, while many voters might believe they're making a choice between Harris's breezy sloganeering and competent performances and the angry lies of the Trump campaign, they're actually being asked to rubber stamp the past four years of the Biden Administration. "The 'ask' is to ratify a record of substantial policy failure and conspicuous ideological fanaticism, dressed up for the moment in a thin promise that we won't make those mistakes again," Douthat wrote. Later in the column, he concluded, "to the undecided voter, this isn't a simple choice between stability and peril. It's a choice between two candidates and coalitions that for different reasons don't merit public confidence."

All the theorizing, reporting, and television production serves an obvious purpose: the past two Presidential elections have come down to a relatively small number of voters in swing states and, fair or not, they are far more important than anyone of any political persuasion in California or Oklahoma. But after nearly a decade of inquiry into these undecided voters—the deep dives into purple counties that voted for Obama in 2008 and 2012, then flipped to Trump in 2016; the much-decried chats with regular folks in the diners of Philadelphia's exurbs—we still don't really know who these people are, despite the fact that we, as the press, have seemingly interviewed every single one of them, sometimes more than once.

This glut of questionable information, and the unyielding math of the Electoral College, has led to a kind of religious relationship between the punditry and the undecided voter. We punctuate nearly everything that happens in either campaign with statements like "What really matters is how all this will play in the Upper Peninsula," which feels as dutiful as a quarterback giving all glory to God after he's won the Super Bowl. We know the undecided voter will decide our destiny, but we cannot conjure up their face, which means that we are left searching for their will in patterns that might very well be useless: opinion polls, anecdotes, and the most convincing of those television testimonials.

I admit that I'm being a bit unfair. It's easy to take up the calm position in the political-talk wars and declare, with all the detached confidence of a bodhisattva, that we actually know nothing at all. The job of defining the undecideds is thankless and yields mostly noise, but it also carries the promise of uncovering critical information about the outcomes of our elections.

The press aren't the only people who are obsessed with undecided voters, either. Despite what more conspiracy-minded people might think about our powers of coördination and the manufacturing of consent, we mostly just follow the leads of the campaigns. And if you just tuned in to the race in the past few weeks, you would be forgiven for confusing Harris—who has touted endorsements from Dick Cheney, Liz Cheney, and a handful of former Reagan staffers—with an anti-Trump Republican. The debate between Trump and Harris would have reinforced this feeling, because even if you, like most of the country, believe that Harris won the debate, the most memorable policy lines often came in the form of feints. "Tim Walz and I are both gun owners," Harris told Trump. "We're not taking anybody's guns away." The moment was pure Harris 2024: a well-delivered and forceful denial of her more liberal past—in this case, the gun-control measures that she did, in fact, champion in her 2019 primary campaign—that falls apart at the slightest touch. Harris wants to require universal background checks and, according to her Web site, will "support red flag laws that keep guns out of the hands of dangerous people." These are sensible policies, but during her most public moments, whether during her speech at the Democratic National Convention or during this debate, she did not mention her future plans for gun control at all, despite the fact that an overwhelming majority of Democratic voters support actually preventing some people from buying guns.

The strategy that has emerged and will likely continue for Harris until Election Day seems to be this: stay light on policy, never say anything that could be construed as too progressive or woke, and wait for Trump to remind voters why they should never let him anywhere near the White House. Whether this is the right strategy is not really my concern here. It seems that the election will be close regardless of what either candidate does between now and November 5th; any theories about what will ultimately decide the contest in swing states will likely be post hoc and strung together by thin threads of an alluring, though probably unrelated, narrative. But I do wonder why the Harris campaign and so many within the punditry automatically equate an appeal to undecided voters with conspicuous moves to the right, including, in Cheney's case, celebrating the endorsement of one of the most reviled right-wing figures of the past fifty years? Each person has one vote, which means that winning over the theoretical Dick Cheney fan who was waffling on Trump matters only if all these nods to the right don't alienate other voters. What is the evidence, for example, that scooting to the right on immigration will bring in those undecided voters? What is the evidence, for that matter, that undecided voters are all centrists who need to be constantly flattered? Perhaps the most visible and organized coalition of undecided voters, for example, are Muslim and Arab Americans who are threatening to stay home or vote third party unless Harris changes her stance on the war in Gaza. Do their votes not count the same as those of the centrist swing voter? And even if we accept that, yes, the theoretical centrist voter matters more, do we actually know if a few batted eyelashes in their direction on immigration or inflation will actually lead to a vote for Harris? A poll from early August found that forty-two per cent of voters in three battleground states think Harris is "too liberal." Do we really know the magic combination of words and ads that will change their minds without alienating other voters with other concerns? Or will they conclude that regardless of how much they might find Trump personally distasteful, they just can't trust a Democratic President?

What seems far more likely is that the theories of the undecided voter are not much more than a mirror for the preferred politics of the people doing the theorizing. Some might point to the Uncommitted Movement and the war in Gaza and find the voices they need to argue that the election will swing on a large Arab and Muslim population in Michigan. Others will warn that appealing to centrist former Trump voters necessitates a shift away from some of Biden's more left-leaning economic policies, which, of course, are also the same policies that these pundits happen to personally disagree with. There is no question that these undecided voters will have an outsized effect on the election, but I do not think there is any one theory that can be confidently stated for winning them over, let alone acted upon. Better to just give up on all the triangulations and junk math and let these actual undecided voters get to know what you stand for and not just who stands by you.