Undecided voters

[davidlevine]

If you, like me, are astonished and depressed that anyone could possibly be an "undecided voter" in the presidential race, you might like to consider something that occurred to me this afternoon.

I consider myself pretty politically savvy. I follow the news, and I'm aware how important local races are. And yet I couldn't name a single person running for mayor or city council in my town (even though lawn signs are already up and I've actually spoken to two mayoral candidates). If you polled me on the local races right now, I'd have to say I'm undecided.

But when I vote (and I will vote, and I will vote early), I will do my research. We have an official Voter's Pamphlet where the candidates and their supporters can make their cases, and I have access to people and publications whose opinions I trust. I will gather enough information to make an informed decision.

So I am sure that there are people who care about presidential politics as much as I care about local politics, but like me they have not yet paid attention to the news or done the necessary research. It's a matter of priorities, and I can't really fault anyone who is too overwhelmed by the day-to-day matter of exiting in this messed-up country to spare any attention to national politics. But many of them will do their due diligence and make a considered choice before casting their ballots.

And I do hold out hope that when they do, the rational and kind choice will be clear.

Comments

[mrissa]

I appreciate that you're trying to be kind and give people the benefit of the doubt here, but I feel like the analogy really does not hold at scale: part of what's so overwhelming is the absolute intrusiveness of the presidential elections in this country. Also anyone old enough to vote in the last election already had to do "due diligence" on one of the candidates if they were going to, and the other was part of the ticket they'd have researched. And finally the only reason someone who is actually doing due diligence would rely on a voter's pamphlet is because other information was not widely available. This is often the case for city, county, school board, or other local races. It is emphatically not the case for national ones. Candidate precedent and behavior go far beyond a few paragraphs in a pamphlet, and sometimes those few paragraphs are actively misleading about the candidate's statements and choices.

So...you may be sure that such people exist, that many of them will do due diligence, etc. I'm not. You haven't demonstrated that they do, and we have LOTS of reasons to think they...at the very least are not numerous.

[redbird]

I suspect that the few percent of genuinely undecided voters (as distinct from people like the known Trump supporters who the NY Times presents as "undecided") are pulled in different directions by two different issues they care about (e.g., abortion and the war in Gaza).

There are also people who say "I haven't decided yet" because they don't want to spend the next month fighting with my family about this, or are afraid/sure that if they tell their husbands or parents who they're voting for, he'll make their life miserable, but "I don't know, I haven't been paying a lot of attention, I'll see what the candidates say next month" feels safer.

We just had a state-level primary, and in my district, none of the incumbents had a primary opponent. So I was doing research into candidates for jobs that people may not even realize exist, like "clerk of the supreme judicial court," which reminded me of Naomi Kritzer's early election posts about jobs like Soil and Water Commissioner. That court clerk job is sufficiently obscure that I was grateful when a local news website linked to an article explaining what it is, and why only voters in one county get to vote for it. But I would have enthusidastically voted for my Congresswoman, and for Sen. Warren, even if either of them had had a primary opponent.