Undecided
Kimberly Aldinger, 45, of Seven Valleys, a dialysis technician who voted for Hillary Clinton in the primary, is open to Obama but “until I see what he wants to change and how he’s going to change it, I am totally undecided.”
Sheryl Randol, 51, a single mother of three who works for a pharmaceutical company, wants to see the Iraq war ended but doesn’t know enough about either candidate.
Obama “has to show me that he’s got the intelligence and the people around him to make a difference globally,” she says. “I want to see concrete plans, not just spin.” ~Paul West
Reading about undecided voters is always an extremely frustrating experience. Granted, I spend much more time reading, thinking, writing and talking about politics than most people, and I am following the campaign even more closely as a blogger than I have done for any other presidential election, but these sorts of statements drive me right up the wall. I do understand that normal, sane people don’t want to spend much of their time thinking about politics, I know most folks are very busy with their own affairs, and I freely acknowledge that there is something odd about those of us who follow it very closely. Even so, there is still no excuse for trotting out these justifications at this point. The presidential campaign has been going on for almost a year and a half, primary voting on the Democratic side went on for six months and we had a mind-killing 20 debates, and the general election is now just a little over four months away. I don’t accept these cop-outs that any of the candidates have failed to “show” voters enough or that their proposals and plans are somehow still vague and undefined. If undecided voters are too busy, too uninterested or simply can’t be bothered to pay attention, that’s all well and good, but let’s not pretend that they can’t make up their minds because the coverage hasn’t been substantive enough or the plans aren’t specific enough. We hear this refrain about wanting to see “concrete plans” every election cycle, and every cycle we hear this after months and months of being inundated with such plans. How can someone who wants to see the war in Iraq ended not know by now which one is opposed to it? It defies understanding.
Even if you accept Chris Hayes’ explanation that undecided voters think politics is important, but don’t like doing political things, that doesn’t excuse such incredible disengagement. Hayes likened the undecided voter’s attitude toward politics to his own dislike of doing laundry; I would compare it to my dislike of driving. Even though I don’t like doing it, I do bother to acquaint myself with traffic laws and some minimal familiarity with how to maintain a car. If some people think of politics as a chore, you’d think they would at least make the effort to do that chore reasonably well.
I share your frustration. A quick stop at each candidate’s website or even a short time spent watching YouTube video clips of the candidates would provide the answers they claim to seek, but many of these “undecided†voters seem to have an aversion to doing even a minimum amount of research. Their continued indecision is deliberate.
I tend to think that when people say things like this, it’s really just a cover for some inner conflict they don’t want to give voice to. They don’t want to come out and say it, so they just use the excuse that “they don’t know enough about so and so” or, “I want to see more concrete plans”. There’s something of a tar-baby syndrome going on here. You could give them all the info and all the plans in the world, and it still wouldn’t be enough. What they need to do is resolve the inner conflict, whatever it is, and then the choice becomes clear. Figuring out what these inner conflicts among undecided voters are, and resolving them, is what the high art of political campaigns is all about.
While I agree with Daniel, I think he misses the most frightening implication of all:
These are the people who will ultimately decide the next President. The — by all appearances — willfully ignorant who await a sign. Perhaps Obama will part Lake Michigan? Or McCain, on a surprise jaunt to Iraq, produce endless loaves and fishes for the troops? Or, failing any of that, maybe they just vote for whomever the media tells them to vote for? (Or did I just repeat myself?)
I’m not a monarchist but I’m beginning to sympathize with them.
You’re right. It is very frightening, but it’s one of those maddening aspects of mass democracy that is so horrible that I try to forget the full implications.
Homer Simpson said it best, “When will Americans learn? Democracy doesn’t work!”
You’re too hard on the undecideds.
Maybe they’ve learned through hard experience that politicians can be counted on not to do what they promise, and are just trying to figure out if the candidates are just going to fall short of their promises or if they’re actually going to do the opposite of what they say they will do.
But being cynical about their intentions doesn’t mean that you are entirely unaware of what they say they’re going to do. I am confident that neither nominee can be trusted, but that doesn’t mean I don’t bother to find out what their positions are. How can these folks gauge whether a politician has kept his promises when they don’t know what his promises are?
[...] In fact, this is the high-information argument that takes for granted that everyone in the country already knows the maximal amount about every phony Obama controversy and also knows enough about Obama himself to know that the controversies are phony. “Oh, yes, the burning flag in the image is rather like the one William Ayers once stepped on in protest of the government! And we all know who William Ayers is, don’t we? Very clever!” This assumption is absolutely wrong, as any focus group with undecided and “swing” voters could tell you. Given the characteristics of many undecided voters, you could not have come up with an image that was more likely to provoke undecided voters in all the wrong ways if the goal was to deprive the false charges of their power and influence in the election.   [...]