The Root of Our Unhealthy Obsession With Undecided Voters

A lot of frantic energy has gone into understanding undecided voters in this election, as in elections past. Whether they’re persuadable or irregular. Whether they’re ambivalent or indifferent. Whether they swing, miss, or go to third. Whether they’re complete zeros or practicing “sagacious delay.” Whether they’re really undecided or just Trump voters in sheep’s clothing. Or maybe decision is actually more of a spectrum (y’know?), and everyone finds themselves “constantly swaying in unison with the national conversation.” Experts have lavished their erudition on the stunning insights that undecided voters have “more ambiguous feelings” about politics and “hold many different policy positions.” Righto.

There’s in fact little evidence that the undecided are that way for any one systematic reason—almost by definition, they are a category of people who are artificially agglutinated. They are not really even representable at all—any more than someone who claimed to have no thoughts could count as a representative of all thoughtless people. (Which is why the analysis of small, anecdotal groups of undecided voters tends to corroborate the tilt of the news outlet concerned.) Nor is it clear that undecided voters will decide this presidential election. About 66 percent of the eligible population voted in 2020—the highest since 1900. The number of those who did not vote (around 34 percent) is overwhelmingly larger than the number of those in play as undecided for this election (a percentage ranging from 3.7 to the low teens). Turnout will likely end up mattering more than changing minds.

Undecided voters are targets of morbid fascination for people who are invested in political news—and who find it incredible that not everyone is—and the polls are of course so close in this election that it feels like everything could hang by the whisker of their preferences. After two debates, an assassination attempt, a jobs report, a new brief on Trump’s attempt to overturn the 2020 election, and (probably) some gratuitous trash-talking of Puerto Rico, the electoral needle has scarcely budged. Most of us decided long ago that we knew all we needed to know. And so the undecided have come to feel like a natural resource to be mined to exhaustion, the precious final scrapings of the political biome. The very condition of being undecided has become exceptional.

At the root of this exceptional status lies an awful, unspoken implication: that the very notion of “decision” is as anachronistic as a powdered wig. After all, there’s something hopeful and beautiful about the idea of the undecided voter. It expresses the democratic principle that each of us can step back to a position of open-ish mind, reconsider our interests, deliberate on the common weal, and soberly choose between alternative platforms. It is this principle alone that makes a democratic process meaningful. Meanwhile, the closest a majority of us have ever come to this condition in recent years is being accidentally exposed to the other party’s cable news channel for 10 minutes in a hotel lobby before blood starts trickling out of our ears.

Some of our curiosity about these voters is also surely due to the feeling that they exist in an untrammeled state of consciousness. Just as Burger King once decided that it would be a great idea to make a commercial in which tribal people from around the globe (or “Whopper virgins”) tested the difference between the Whopper and the Big Mac—as if their reactions might be more meaningful than those of the fast-food fallen—so does some of the coverage of undecided voters dramatize our own imagination of what it would be like not to be so sure of ourselves.

The likelihood is that, far from living in epistemic virginity, the undecided have been blasted by a comparable audiovisual assault to the rest of us—and have managed not to react to it. Indeed, the more information we get about the opinions of specific undecided voters, the less there seems to be going on in there; the more capricious, incoherent, zoned out, and more-undecided-than-thou they seem, their views an impressionistic jetsam of reprocessed political spam. For the purposes of the general election, they are coin tosses embodied.

So the terrible paradox is that—as the rest of the electorate in decisive states asymptotically converges toward a 50–50 deadlock—the outcome of a highest-stakes presidential election may lie in the hands of people who care and think the least about it. Whereas the people who know and think and care the most are the ones for whom the very idea of entertaining an alternative position has become anathema to our self-conception. And this is obviously pathological. No healthy democracy can credibly sustain itself on vibes or identities alone—both are symptoms of a viral and virulent politics.

The situation is by and large an effect of the fever hallucination that is the Donald Trump character: to continually force us to avow where we stand on the question of his own (in)credibility, discard the presumption that presidents are elected to protect the law, and kick away the notion that he is engaged in the project of advancing “reasons” or “ideas” that should persuade. Evaluating or fact-checking Trumpisms feels like missing the point, like trying to comprehend the lyrics of a Nicki Minaj song by writing them out in symbolic logic. With his saurian canniness, Trump once commented that he could shoot someone in the middle of Fifth Avenue without losing any votes. Conversely, it is hard to conceive what it would take for most on the other side to revisit him. Even if he underwent a complete metamorphosis and acted Tom Hanksy from here on out, not only would I not change my vote, I might even feel slightly betrayed, left in the lurch.

It would be easy to rejoin that things have always been this way. American voters and politicians have seldom been very articulate; and this has sort of worked out. Maybe so, but Trump was not hatched from nothing. For one, we have endlessly more information at our fingertips about the electoral process than ever before. Just as it is the very consumption of the news that consolidates partisan identities, our informational surfeit also serves to discredit the authority of the electoral process by shining an unforgiving light on its every aspect. From how people make up their minds, to how voter rolls are established, to how ballots are filled out and mailed, to how Dominion voting machines work, to how election results are certified: the more we know, the more visible the margins of human error therein. (How could it be otherwise in a process involving more than 150 million voters and hundreds of thousands of election officials, many of whom are themselves now invested in discrediting the process?)

Moreover, our digital media environment is now national, such that it’s much less clear how people’s individual experiences should reliably inform their vote. When undecided voters say that the economy is bad or that they just don’t know Harris well enough—when they repeat national talking points—it’s not exactly clear why these should count as well-founded reasons even for them. (Is the economy specifically bad for this person? Worse than the alternative? Have they made an effort to find this out? Do they know how a president can actually affect the economy? And how and why do they weigh the economy as more significant than all competing concerns?) But nor is it clear what could count as satisfactory reasons to vote otherwise even in principle. Around and around we swarm. Information is the wonder of our age in many ways. It just happens to also undermine the possibility of political trust, consensus, and legitimacy.

A brief analogy: Contrary to expectations, the introduction of video assistant refereeing into soccer inflamed controversies about games rather than forestalling them. Similarly, the stupendous availability of information in our political lives—and the desire to render it decisive—sows division, conflict, and conspiracy. Information feels like it could be just neutral. In theory, we’re each in a position to verify it. But in practice, we’re collectively just not that capable or interested. We fall back on trusting the voices that strike a chord with us. I am not saying that these voices are equivalent. Just that Trump is what will keep happening, so long as we think our political judgments should rest on (more) information alone.

My wife was recently phone-banking for Kamala Harris. “May I ask whom you’re planning on voting for?” she asked a North Carolina voter (as part of the given script). “Mmmm, definitely not Trump—who’s that other one?” Right this way; here is your ballot; let me show you to your booth.