The Myth of the Undecided Voter

The end of Wednesday night's debate played out the way the first two Presidential debates played out. The debate ended. Cable news stations trotted out their political analysts who, with few exceptions, called the debate a tie or a very close contest one way or the other. Then, within an hour, the results of polls of focus groups made up of undecided voters all broke heavily in favor of Barack Obama, freeing many of the previously cautious pundits to declare Obama the winner.

But who are these undecided voters? Should our pundits be listening to them? How can anyone still be undecided after nearly two years and 49 debates? What have these people been doing?

Apparently, there are people out there who simply can't stand listening to politicians speak. After the debate, an undecided carpenter from Fairfield, Connecticut told Connecticut Post writer Marian Gail Brown this:

Really, I am more confused than ever after watching this debate. They sounded like the teachers in those old 'Peanuts' cartoons. You know, the ones who go wah-wah-wah like robots and nobody knows what they're really saying. So, I am going to have to keep reading about them, trying to figure out how their tax plans and health-care proposals affect me and my family.

So there are undecided voters out there, but how many?Well, it depends on who you ask.

In the Wall Street Journal, earlier this month, Karl Rove wrote, "There are probably more undecided and persuadable voters open to switching their choice than in any election since 1968."

Election stats guru Nate Silver of FiveThirtyEight.Com agrees that the number of undecided voters is higher than normal, but not as high as Rove asserts. Silver puts it into historical perspective:

In the Gallup tracking poll that straddled October 1st, 8 percent of voters were unaccounted for. This figure is significantly higher than 2004, an unusually partisan election in which just 2 percent of voters were unaccounted for. But, it was no higher than 2000 or 1976, and lower than in 1988. On average, since 1936, 6.8 percent of voters were unaccounted for in the Gallup poll as of October 1st, as compared this year's 8 percent; the difference is not statistically significant. If we look only at results since 1960 -- Gallup's polling was a little sketchy in its early years -- the average number of unaccounteds is 6.4 percent. So this year's figure is probably toward the higher end of the spectrum, but well within the normal range.

Silver goes on to point out that the more significant category is persuadable voters rather than undecided voters. The 21 percent of persuadable voters reported by the Pew Research Center is right in line with the elections of 1992, 1996 and 2000.

In an op-ed for the L.A. Times, Ezra Klein argued that undecided voters are a much smaller and far less politically powerful group than conventional wisdom would have us believe. "[T]here are no solid numbers on undecided voters," Klein writes, "in part because the numbers change with every election and, within every election, with every successive month and event and even poll. Right now, if you look at the three main tracking polls -- Gallup, Hotline and Rasmussen -- they show that between 5% and 12% of the electorate is undecided."

Citing a study, Klein also points out that many of those who claim to be undecided actually have made a decision. Another study shows that of nine presidential elections studied, only the 1976 race between came down to swing voters.