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.
