wpt global The Black Box of the Undecided Voter Won’t Yield Its Secrets

Every four yearswpt global, the actors and observers of U.S. politics descend upon a single group of people, the undecided voters of America.

We devote thousands of pages of digital ink to profiling undecided voters, scrutinizing their beliefs, examining their motives and working furiously to find the issue or concern that might flip them from undecided to having made a decision.

And the campaigns, of course, devote endless resources — hundreds of millions of dollars — to identifying undecided voters and converting them, as much as possible, to the ranks of the decided.

This year, CNN’s Harry Enten notes, there are very few undecided voters. “It’s kind of hard to believe, but the bottom line is that 4 percent, 4 percent in the average of polls, 4 percent of voters say that they are undecided,” he said. “That is just half the level that we saw in 2020, well less than the 10 percent we saw at this point in 2016.”

Even with so few undecided voters, it’s hard to imagine who they are. It’s not just that we live in an age of deep partisan polarization but also that it seems unreasonable to think that anyone could be undecided about Donald Trump. He has been, for close to 10 years, a nearly omnipresent figure in American life. He served four years as president and, after he failed to keep himself in the White House, refused to leave the national stage. There’s almost no new information to learn about his beliefs, priorities or ability to do the job. There aren’t, at this point, any questions left to ask the man. Either you want him in office or you don’t.

Still, there are those voters who can’t decide. For reasons more idiosyncratic than not, they cannot bring themselves to pass judgment on either candidate. Or at least that’s the conventional wisdom. But there’s a chance we’re getting this all wrong. There’s a chance these voters aren’t undecided at all. Rather, they are a portion of the large segment of Americans who don’t see politics as an interest worth having.

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