Undecided Voters are Uninformed and Disengaged

Many commentators have suggested that undecided voters’ opinions are better understood not as deeply held, thought-through beliefs, but as a sort of verbal Muzak. You say, of a candidate who has given many policy specifics already (and whose opponent speaks in word salad), “I need more policy specifics,” because it sounds better than “I don’t know what policies I want.” You say “The candidates just attack each other” because it sounds better than “I don’t actually know what the candidates are attacking each other about.” You say “I just need to hear more,” 16 months into an election cycle, because it sounds better than saying “I wasn’t listening.” This is natural enough. I don’t really believe that there’s such a thing as being “apolitical”—how we live among others is our politics, and it may be incoherent or unarticulated, but it’s always there. But what we’re asking uncommitted voters for is not “politics,” exactly, but something more like “recent national party-politics news knowledge” or “policy opinions.” You can’t really know these things unless you like doing homework and have a statistically abnormal amount of time for it. Most people have jobs to do, a mounting sleep debt, and painful memories of school; the deep political agnosticism and lack of detailed knowledge of current events that results from these conditions isn’t surprising, nor is it evidence of bad character or defective intelligence. But it’s also hard to cop to when a camera is pointed at you.

So why do we put so much emphasis on their political opinions?