With a presidential election only weeks away, the quadrennial focus on undecided voters is again reaching a fevered pitch.
Today, undecided voters are making up a historically smaller but more crucial voting block. Reviewing pollingreport.com, this cohort represents between 4 to 8 percent of the electorate, enough to tip a close election. Hence the near obsessive focus by both campaigns in reaching these voters and getting them to turn out.
But while undecideds may be essential to the election, it does not mean they are constructive to the process. This proposition is at strongly at odds with the enduring mythology about this cohort.
Campaigns coddle, indulge and celebrate the undecideds.
The news media is worse, often sanctifying these voters as the authentic arbiters of American democracy, as they appear impervious to political persuasion through ads, campaign outreach, conventions and debates. By simply holding out the longest, undecideds are revered as the least ideological of voters and the most concerned with “the issues.”
Balderdash.
Writing in the Washington Post today, Ezra Klein quoted the work of Lynn Vavreck, a political scientist at the University of California at Los Angeles, who has studied undecided voters in detail:
“They are lower on political information, for sure. That’s a function of being not that interested and not paying attention,” she said. “It’s not that they can’t comprehend the information, or that they’re at a balancing point and can’t decide. They’re just not dialed in. They’re not getting all the information you or I are getting.”
Vavreck asked thousands of voters — both decided and undecided — a battery of basic, multiple-choice questions about who’s who in politics. The questions were designed to be easy. You didn’t have to know that John Boehner is Speaker of the House. You just had to know he is a congressman rather than a judge or the vice president.
According to Vavreck’s polling, only 35 percent of undecided voters could identify Boehner’s job as“congressman.” Only 69 percent could say that Joe Biden is the vice president rather than, say, a representative. Only 17 percent can identify Chief Justice John Roberts as a judge.”
I have written often over the past year that this election is probably as consequential to the future of America as were the elections of 1860 or 1932. And now that future may be decided by a cohort where more than 30 percent don’t know who the Vice President is?
That’s not just appalling, its terrifying.
Would you let a ballet dancer pick your fantasy football team? Would you pick an OB-GYN to do your heart surgery? Would you buy a car without comparing alternatives? It’s just a fact that in every day life that we seek out experts and expertise for our most important decisions.
But in this transcendental decision for the nation, the least qualified people may be the most important component in making the choice.
It is maddening.
Honestly, how could you rationally look at the policy positions of Mitt Romney and Barack Obama and be undecided? It is truly the clearest choice in a generation or more. This is not a Bud or Bud Light election. What is left for the candidates to say that hasn’t already been spoken, written, tweeted, posted and analyzed?
What are these voters waiting for?
It is ridiculous.
Civic responsibility requires more than simply going through the motions of a vote. It requires that each of us, no matter our political persuasion, need to become informed citizens.
This isn’t the NFL or MLB we are talking about here, where a new season starts off fresh next year after the wrap up the last, no matter how intense and passionate the fan base is.
Elections matter individually, locally regionally and nationally. They impact our income, our careers, our homes, our families, our schools – our very safety from local crime and terrorist attack. Moreover, the choices now will have impact for years to come. We are not simply choosing for today. We are making choices that our children will have the grapple with.
That is a most serious responsibility that shouldn’t be left to the weakest chain in the link.
So, go ahead and recognize undecideds for the role that an open and free democracy places upon them.
But don’t indulge or glorify them as the heroic final holdouts for a better America. Ignorance is the death of democracy, not its salvation.
The “better America” crowd is more properly defined by those voters – of all parties – who took the time to master the issues and decide on an informed basis.