The Indecisive Undecided Voter
These people are frustrating.
Reuters (“Some undecided voters not convinced by Harris after debate with Trump“):
Kamala Harris was widely seen as dominating Tuesday’s presidential debate against Republican former president Donald Trump, but a group of undecided voters remained unconvinced that the Democratic vice president was the better candidate.
Reuters interviewed 10 people who were still unsure how they were going to vote in the Nov. 5 election before they watched the debate. Six said afterward they would now either vote for Trump or were leaning toward backing him. Three said they would now back Harris and one was still unsure how he would vote.
Harris and Trump are in a tight race and the election will likely be decided by just tens of thousands of votes in a handful of battleground states, many of whom are swing voters like the undecided voters who spoke to Reuters.
Although the sample size was small, the responses suggested Harris might need to provide more detailed policy proposals to win over voters who have yet to make up their minds.
Five said they found Harris vague during the more than 90-minute debate on how she would improve the U.S. economy and deal with the high cost of living, a top concern for voters.
The encounter was particularly important for Harris, with a weekend New York Times/Siena College opinion poll showing that more than a quarter of likely voters feel they do not know enough about her, in contrast to the well-known Trump.
The Trump converts said they trusted him more on the economy, even though all said they did not like him as a person. They said their personal financial situation had been better when he was president between 2017-2021. Some singled out his proposal to tax foreign imports, although economists say that is likely to raise prices.
Four of those six also said Harris did not convince them she would pursue different economic policies than Democratic President Joe Biden, a Democrat they largely blame for the high cost of living.
“I still don’t know what she is for,” said Mark Kadish, 61, an entrepreneur in Florida. “There was no real meat and bones for her plans.”
Four of the voters are women and six are men; eight are white and two are Black. All have voted for both Democratic and Republican candidates in the past.
While a focus group of ten people who claim to be “undecided” has little probative value, I suspect that the small group of people who will both 1) actually show up to vote in November’s election and 2) honestly haven’t made up their minds whether Donald Trump or Kamala Harris would be a better President is similarly unreasonable.
I agree with Kadish that Harris has been deliberately opaque regarding her policy proposals. As someone who follows American politics closer than most, I have only a vague idea of what kind of President she would be. Is she basically the Kamala Harris who ran in 2019 as a soft progressive? Or has four years in the Biden administration changed her perspective considerably? Damned if I know.
But her opponent is a sociopath who has already served as President for four years. We have a pretty good idea who he is. And it’s not like he’s exactly a policy wonk. This is the man who has only has a “concept of a plan” regarding the ObamaCare replacement he’s been touting for the last nine years.
I fully understand not being excited about either candidate. Hell, it’s been 25 years since I was excited to vote for somebody for President. “Is this really the best we can do?!” has been a common refrain in recent cycles. But you can’t decide between a woman who’s vague on policy details and a man who rants about immigrants eating people’s pets and “transgender operations on illegal aliens that are in prison”? Really?
Honestly, the only “undecided” voters I can understand are religious conservatives who loathe Trump personally but see him as likely to keep appointing like-minded judges and more apt than Harris to support polices they like. That’s at least a genuine dilemma.
Say what you will, but I was excited to elect Barack Obama, and I’m very excited to elect Kamala Harris, who was my preferred candidate in 2020 as well (or at least tied with Buttegieg).
Generally, I tend to prefer a primary candidate who doesn’t win the Democratic nod. I was a Gary Hart supporter in the 1988 primary, before he revealed himself to be 1/250th of the philanderer that Donald Trump gets away with being every day, and I regretted we were stuck with Dukakis.
After my preferred candidate, Paul Tsongas lost in the primaries, I even came around to excitement about electing Bill Clinton in 1992 after Reagan had destroyed our country’s global reputation and economy. It was so refreshing to have somebody run who was not part of that awful corruption and dishonesty.
I have always felt like the Republican candidate is racist and awful toward Americans they dislike (or don’t respect) – right down to McCain, so it has always been easy to know that the Democratic candidate was the right choice whether I was “excited” or not.
To be undecided at this point is to be a person that doesn’t stand for anything, so they will fall for anything.
Most “undecided voters” are just Trump voters pulling a “the card says moops” to screw with people
To be an undecided voter in this election is like being offered the choice between a chicken dinner and a bowl of moldy dog shit sprinkled with broken glass, and pausing to ask how the chicken is prepared.
As I’ve observed before, on economics Harris is between a rock and a hard place. “Bidenomics” is working pretty good, the only sensible thing to do is continue what’s working. But, for reasons that make no sense and have been widely discussed, politically she can’t say that. If she were a Republican, she’d just lie. But for various reasons Harris can’t just repudiate Biden. So what is she to do?
Maybe she should do what Trump would do and promise to bring inflation down to the Fed’s target on her first day in office. Easy to promise since they’ve already pretty much done it.
@Stormy Dragon:
If so, he’s got a 7-point lead in the latest NYT/Sienna poll.
@James Joyner:
They also may be just reluctant to admit they’re voting for Trump for a variety of reasons.
For certain people, policy doesn’t mean anything. America has a side that is all junk. You have a junk education, junk religion, and then you live at the mercy of a junk system of employers or the state. Add into the equation the possibility that your kid ends up on opiates. People who have money and education can’t get their kids to stay clean. Imagine dealing with that while being unlucky and stuck.
There’s no policy or economic message which connects to this part of the world. Undecided voters are mostly idiots when they articulate what they’re undecided about, but this often comes from a place where everything is bad news.
@CSK: For sure. But, again, that’s bad news if true: it’s still polling as a very tight race. If most “undecideds” are actually closet Trump supporters, he’s apt to win.
If there is a poll that would survey this sector of the voting population I suggest that the first question to be asked of these citizens would be:
“How much do you actually loathe convicted felon, serial liar, sexual predator Donald Trump or do you secretly admire him because you wish that you could act as depraved as he does and get away with it?”
@CSK:
I’ve been saying this for a long time and that’s why I distrust the polls. The polls were wrong in 2020 and I wouldn’t bet against them being wrong this year.
I am going to push back a bit here because I think that you do have a decent idea of how she will govern. And that is like most Democrats would depending on who controls Congress and by what margins.
Indeed, while I am not at all opposed to candidates giving policy details, you and I both know that those specific policy proposals are almost certainly not going to happen unless the partisan stars align in other ways.
I think we (as a country) fall into this desire for specifics without acknowledging that those promises are not worth a lot because presidents can only do so much. We are electing a general governing direction, not a set of guaranteed policy proposals. I wish, in fact, we (as a country) better understood that.
Quite frankly, I think that the media focus on the lack of specific answers to certain question is partially an attempt to be “balanced.” Since they want to rightly criticize Trump for all of his nonsense they have to continually point out the Harris has changed her position of fracking. Or that she is vague on how she will do x, y, or z.
These are not equivalent.
Moreover, Trump isn’t exactly a master of detail.
And when I hear undecided voters (like a guy on NPR today) talk about wanting more policy details–that strikes me a way to make his indecision look smart.
@James Joyner: Indeed. They are not all Trump voters.
The NYT had a similar article to the Reuters piece, both leave you wondering how random was the selection of undecided voters was. While over at the Atlantic, Sarah Longwell, whose business it is to run long term tracking polls of swing voters reports that her focus group reacted favorably to Harris.
We probably won’t know if the debate moved the polls till the weekend, when the next series of polls will be released.
Particularly in this election, the whole “detailed policy plans” screed is a red herring, the Felon has none, but Harris needs them because she’s the adult. It also ignores the reality of
sausage makinglegislating in our system. Biden’s IRA would have been much more progressive if Sinema and Manchin would have signed on and the ACA would have had a public option except for opposition w/in the Dem senators.Particularly here, we should know that Harris will govern as a mainstream Dem, because that is political reality of what is acceptable to voters. A year, 18 months from now the usual suspects on the Dem left will be whining that she isn’t doing enough, blah, blah, blah.
@Stormy Dragon: yup. The folks at MeidasTouch looked at the social media pages of one CNN panel “undecided voter,” and it was filled with pro-Trump posts. When questioned, the panelist said that he told CNN upfront that he supported Trump, and they just said, “Well, keep an open mind.”
I wonder how many other “undecided voters” chosen for these stories have similar views that a social media search would easily discover?
ETA: I just finished reading James’s response. I don’t know whether all “undecided voters” are secret Trump voters, but I think it’s worthwhile to question whether those chosen by the media to represent the undecided point of view truly are.
I don’t know that all the undecideds are closet Trump voters, but Mark Kadish, in the OP, almost certainly is. Demographically speaking, a 61-year-old male Floridian entrepreneur is gonna be a very likely Republican voter.
He’s probably not being forthright with the news team. How can one possibly not know what Harris’ values are, and how she wants to move things forward?
Maybe she needs a “big idea”, something that she’s going to do on Day 1 in office? Did Obama run on a big policy initiative? I don’t recall that he did. People complained about “hopey, changey”, but they voted for him.
I DON’T understand not being excited to vote between the two dramatically different visions of our country’s future I am getting to decide between. Neither party is being remotely vague or coy about where the country stands now as they see it and where they want to take it in the future. More “real meat and bones” on the policy plans is going to tell you whether you want to live in a democracy where we at least try to work toward the common good and seek to maximize personal freedoms or an authoritarian republic where we demonize the other and seek to forcibly restore some mythological past when America was homogeneous and low-cost?
Policy details don’t mean anything when the difference in direction is so bloody stark. The Democrats (with their vision of the future they are overtly supporting) could be running a shoe salesman while the Republicans (with their overtly supported vision of the future) could be running George Washington’s ghost. I can tell you I would be EXCITED to vote for the shoe salesman even knowing they might fail to achieve their vision rather than choose a direction I would loathe whether successful or not.
@Steven L. Taylor:
Or what Steven said more succinctly than I.
At the risk of repeating myself from the Dershowitz post — and in the words of Dr. Ned Podbillion from The Bob Newhart show, repeating myself is something that I never, never, never, never do — every time I see the reassembled groups of “undecided voters” on camera I get the strong feeling that they all are acutely aware that as soon as they declare a preference they will no longer be invited back to be on TV. Saying “gosh, I still just can’t decide” guarantees them at least one more spot on television, and probably a free diner meal, too.
If you call yourself ‘undecided’, especially if you’re on a media panel, you have value to the media. Once you make a choice you’re irrelevant. They aren’t going to walk away from the spotlight so long as they’re getting attention for being morons.
@Michael Reynolds:
Michael,
You just successfully described guests on the Jerry Springer show.
Harris does have policy in some details at her website. Not in great detail but tells you her preferred direction. Would I like more detail? Maybe? It’s mostly wishful thinking since a lot of it involves Congress passing stuff. However, as others have noted there is a real double standard here. Trump is also short on specifics. A very specific set of plans does exist in Project 2025 but he is trying to back off of that. I think this is once again just Trump being Trump and he gets a pass.
Steve
For years I’ve been calling bullshit on ‘undecided voters.’
My opinion is that thesec days they’re largely performance actors, attentention whores, that is, people who: (1) because of branding, issues are Trump Republicans who don’t want to say that they’re Trump Republicans, and (2) want to appear to be more thoughtful than the 90% of voters who have made up their minds, and (3) wouldn’t mind being in a televised media ‘event’ (e.g. a CNN focus group) where that they get the attention they crave.
@Steven L. Taylor: I fully agree that, even if Harris had very detailed policy proposals out, she would not be able to enact them unless she had a likeminded Congress, including a Senate supermajority. Which is not going to happen.
That said, Harris is sui generis in my lifetime, if not the entire modern history of major party presidential nominees. She was handed the nomination after the primaries were over, so she did not spend the very long period that major party nominees usually go through being vetted. We have her short-lived 2019 run as a baseline but she’s no longer a California Senator but someone who has served nearly a full term as Veep. She’s an intelligent woman, so I expect that experience has changed her views on some issues and given her cause to deeply consider issues that just weren’t relevant in her previous role. What those are, though, I have only some vague ideas.
@Steven L. Taylor: Again, I fully agree that in comparison to Trump she’s a full-fledged policy wonk. And, not for nothing, not demonstrably a sociopath. I’d vote for a Bernie Sanders-AOC ticket if it was up against Trump. That doesn’t mean I don’t care what her policy views are.
@steve: Whatever else one can say about Trump, you know what you’re getting. He spent four years as President and seems to have doubled down on his worst impulses.
@James Joyner:
I honestly think you are overestimating how much real information we get from the primary process.
I mean, yes, Harris’ route to the nomination has been unique, I don’t deny that at all.
I just think that we are all taught that the long and grinding primary campaign teaches us stuff, and I am not sure that it does, on balance.
Consider the short campaigns in most countries. They clearly do not hamper the ability of citizens to make choices.
@James Joyner:
I get that. But, seriously, what is it that you can’t at least guestimate within a reasonable range about her views?
@Steven L. Taylor: Oh yes, this. What Steven said.
We know she will continue to support Ukraine and NATO vs Putin/Russia.
We know she will continue to support Obamacare and improvements.
We know she will not impose a giant general tarriff.
We know she will support getting politics out of the doctor’s office, as she and Wallz have been saying, which I take to mean support of reproductive freedom, and also trans health care. But she doesn’t care to make gender-affirming care that front and center, so be it. I personally can live with that because I know what the other side wants.
I don’t feel I need to know more on these areas. I also think that the Biden/Harris economic team has done ok. The inflation was world-wide, and not really something they did. The investment world understands that, and notices that inflation is now under control.
@James Joyner:
@Steven L. Taylor:
There’s a good argument to be made that the selection of Harris by the party pros was a better process than the primaries.
That just proves my thesis: There are no undecided voters. There are voters who are definitely going to vote for Trump; there are voters who are definitely going to vote for Harris; and there are voters who say they are undecided but definitely going to vote for Trump.
Although, to be fair, the flip side could be true also: undecided voters who will vote for Harris but are afraid to be open about it. Still, I lean toward the first premise. You may not know fully what you’re getting in a Harris presidency, but you KNOW what you’ll get with a Trump presidency. Again, being undecided is like trying to decide between a PB&J sandwich and a glass shards-laden dog shit sandwich and seriously mulling over the glass shards-laden dog shit. In-fkg-credible.
@DeD: This is the illustration of the Democrats self-owning and losing in advance.
The Republicans would have never won territory from you if they had your type of thinking.
Sales is hard. Converting new customers is hard.
Addressable markets are always something built sliver by sliver.
And Leave in UK or the disgusting FN would have never won their margins
Pre-selling yourself on “can’t win over” is how you leave bloody money on the table, or rather some bloody margins on the table and you have zero margin to leave any margin.
@Sleeping Dog: Entirely 100% agree. Your pseudo-democratic primaries are enormous structural mistakes, structures that have now recently begun – like all infra it takes time for flaws to show through – to show their profound mis-construction.
@Lounsbury:
I said nothing about giving up and not trying to win over more voters. I’ve always been against the way in which Democrats cede to the Republicans areas and populations without at least making the attempt there.
So, don’t go attributing to me your ideas, because I never said what you assert I said.
ETA: And when you say “Republicans would have never won territory from you . . .” you’re making a huge assumption that I’m a Democrat. Quit making an ass out of yourself with your speculative assumptions; you’re as full of shyt as the rest of us.
Undecided voters on TV panels are often shown to be charlatans as noted above. I’m sure there are real ones who are simply uninformed and uninterested people. I’m also sure a lot of them don’t vote anyway.
People can comb all over the web searching for people eating pets, but they can’t take the time to go to a candidates website and review their platform and underlying agenda, ideas etc…. and then say “I haven’t seen the details”. People are lazy. They don’t want details. That requires thinking. All undecided voters are just people who should sit it out and stay home. There is plenty on Harris website to form an understanding of what policies and positions she would pursue.
@DeD: One group of “undecided” voters who will flip for Harris are married women – particularly married women from Red areas of the country. Many of them cannot publicly tell pollsters that they won’t be voting for Trump.
@Tony W:
Indeed.
Not arguing for or against anything written here, just wondering: I wonder how many people have “Undecided” as their natural setting? I have a sister who “keeps an open mind” and “listens to all sources”, but who I know is going to vote for Harris beyond the shadow of a doubt. She, and those like her, have a real need to not close off options early, and on everything, not just politics. They sincerely believes she they have not made their mind up even if those who know them best can tell you with certainty what they are going to do.
Okay, in fairness, my sister despises Trump as a sexual predator and a bully and so is not undecided about him. But she is about so much else in her life, including other politicians. It used to bug me that she dragged every decision out until way, way past the time it was obvious, until I realized that not sealing off her options until she had to gave her a sense of control.
(Excuse the mangled sentences above. I have started to depend on the edit key again, and sometimes it just doesn’t show)
@Scott F.:
For one thing, my vote is essentially irrelevant since Virginia is functionally a Blue state at this point. (Of course, my vote for GWB in 2000 was even more irrelevant in Alabama.) For another, while I agree that the choice between a horrible human being and Kamala Harris is stark and easy, that doesn’t mean I’m excited about four years of a Harris presidency.
I don’t know where Reuters is finding these clowns, but the NYT has cast Bob Reed, two-time Trump voter, as an “undecided” and has quoted him 6 times in the past 10 weeks.
Just like Glenn Kessler’s Fact-Checks, its made-up shadowboxing sports journalism disguised as political news.
@DeD: Huge assumption mate? Well you’re not a Republican that’s clear. Speaking broadly you can reframe, the party political label is not the important to the point.
The broad statement that there are no undecided voters is giving up – you avoid admitting it but it is exactly functionally that.
@Monala: I’m reminded of how often the random diner customers in FTFNYT’s (a reference to recent comments) numerous cletus safaris turned out to be local GOP activists.
@James Joyner:
Yes, we know. But the appropriate Democratic strategy to counter that fact has nothing whatsoever to do with policy statements — or, at least, not honest ones.
@Lounsbury:
That’s not giving up; it’s just a subjective observation. I’ve been pretty open about admitting my political opinions and forecasts are as full of shyt as anyone’s. Let me break down to you my presidential voting history:
1980: Reagan
1984: Reagan
1988: Bush I
1992: Perot (Yeah, I’m a fukn idiot, sometimes. Sue me.)
1996: Clinton
2000: Bush II
2004: Bush II
**2006, I start to move away from Republican party, partly due to the profligate spending, but mostly due to the racism, particularly of the rank & file.
2008: Obama. I was a McCain voter until he foisted upon us that empty-headed “all-of-them-that-have-been-in-front-of-me” intellectual defect.
2012: Obama
2016: HRC
2020: Biden
Again, what you think about me isn’t the reality you’re conjuring up. My subjective observation doesn’t lead to your conclusion about me.
@James Joyner:
OK, that’s fair. But on the other hand, how much variation has there been in Democratic administration policies over the past 40 years? A slow drift to the left on LGBTQ+ rights; a slow drift to the right on labor issues and economic policy; a step to the left on national healthcare strategy; a step to the right on international relations and defense. Overall, it’s hard to credit that a savvy observer like you doesn’t know pretty much what any Dem admin would bring.
@Bill Jempty: Sadly, the guests on Jerry Springer were also, typical voters. And if you’re thinking that I have a jaundiced view of my fellow citizens, you’re right, I do.
@Lounsbury: You should be more generous to your interlocutors. It really is difficult most days to determine whether you are participating merely to amuse yourself or whether you have something substantial to say.
@DrDaveT: Hey now! A Bernie Sanders – AOC ticket is one that might have made me register to vote when I returned from Korea. Tacking to the center is good for the “just plain middle class folks” who are in the two upper quartiles, but it’s not gonna do much if anything for the lower two because “wha’choo talkin’ bout? The economy’s great!”
@Sleeping Dog:
Ha. We’d be lucky to get a mainstream Dem White House, should Harris win. Harris only ran left in the 2020 primaries because she, like Dem candidates save Biden, followed the Bernie bandwagon hype and forgot Hillary’s much larger coalition still ran the show.
Harris was never a progressive true believer. Like Obama — who cosplayed as antiwar hippie in 2007-08 to exploit Hillary’s Iraq War vote — Harris is a skilled liberal opportunist, a cipher, and a small d-democrat who follows the electorate (not a criticism).
Harris’s tax proposal is disappointingly to the right of Biden’s. She very well may govern like Obama did: as a Romney-in-Massachusetts Jack Kemp Republican.
Biden is the most liberal prez since LBJ, maybe FDR. For this, his allies labeled him “Genocide Joe” before screaming “F–k Joe Biden” and telling him he was too old and senile to be rallied behind.
There was zero chance of replacing Biden with someone more left. Arguably, America could only allow a geriatric white male Scranton Catholic to get away with governing as a sleeper socialist. Hence why professional leftist like Bernie and AOC broke from their brocialist fans and fought to keep him.
Having got what they and others asked for, now the brocialist rank-and-file on Twitter is dismayed to find Harris’s platform is less aggressive than even Hillary 2016. A typical response reminds these folks they rewarded Sec. Clinton with #NeverHillary and #BernieOrBust hashtags, and she lost the electoral college. So why would Harris repeat the strategy of chasing pavement?
Where a potential President Harris lands ideologically probably depends on how she wins (if). A youthquake landslide replete with a Democratic Congress would likely elicit a more left-wing presidency than a nail-bitter that 1) generates a Republican Senate and 2) obligates Harris to anti-Trump conservatives.
The inevitable lefty and Democratic whining following scenario two would be our own fault for demanding perfection from Gore, Kerry, Obama, Hillary, and Biden instead of circling the wagons for them. Liberals are still paying the price for failing to show up in the 2010 and 2014 midterms. We allow the Overton window to move to the right with our purity pony petulance and then cry about it.
@just nutha:
I have a jaundiced view of politics.
Politics is the 2nd oldest profession. Like the first, prostitution, it has two things in common.
They both take money for services
They will both screw you
@Bill Jempty:
There’s a big difference between the two.
One would perform any act, say or do anything, no matter how debasing, repulsive, repugnant, or immoral, for some money.
The other is a hooker.
@James Joyner:
You keep wanting to make it choice between individual leaders based on their character. But the choice this year is between two administrations based on starkly different visions of governance. In this election, you are choosing between a forward looking democracy and a retrograde authoritarian state. Even if your vote won’t flip an electoral vote (I get it. I live in California.) I would like to believe you can muster some sense of civic pride in defending democracy.
I know you don’t want to believe the Republican Party has completely given into being the party of horrible human beings (plural not just Trump), but it has. The evidence of this is crystal clear in the rhetoric of not only Trump and Vance, but of all Republican surrogates out there speaking up. All the “reasonable” Republicans have either bent the knee or are cowed into silence. Maybe after 4 years of a Democratic administration, Trumpism will whither and you can return to holding your nose and choosing the lesser of two evils based on policy preferences. But, that is not where we are now.
@Bill Jempty: The politics of a nation are a reflection of the morals and values of it’s people. Politics and prostitution are only selling what people are buying.