Undecided Voters Are a Menace

[DonViejo]

by Michelle Cottle Sep 23, 2012 4:45 AM EDT

The other outtake from Mitt’s 47 percent speech—his focus on voters who haven’t made up their minds. Who the hell are these people? Michelle Cottle why they’re not worth catering to.

Let us, for the moment, pause in our hyperventilation over the “47 percent” about whom Mitt Romney recently got caught talking smack. Yes, branding roughly half the nation as lazy, entitled parasites is impolitic. Getting caught on video doing it in a roomful of rich donors is downright sloppy. But, honestly, what politician doesn’t harbor at least some bitterness toward what he regards as the opposition forces?

The bit of Romney’s lecture that I found still more depressing? His acknowledgement that his true mission is to reach that wafer-thin sliver of voters still sitting on the political fence. As he told the assembled diners: “What I have to do is convince the 5 to 10 percent in the center that are independent, that are thoughtful, that look at voting one way or the other depending on in some cases emotion—whether they like the guy or not, what he looks like.”

With this internally contradictory statement (thoughtful people vote on emotion?) Romney touched upon a grim electoral truth: at this stage of the race, the vast majority of people still waffling aren’t so much “independent” or “thoughtful” or centrist so much as they are utterly clueless.

Ask the political scientists, pollsters, and other professional analyzers of the electorate who parse these sorts of things. They will tell you—as they have told me repeatedly over the years—that undecideds or swing voters or whatever you want to call them tend to be low-information folks who cast their ballots based on whichever candidate gives them the last-minute warm-and-fuzzies. (Did you see that guy’s smile in the last debate? Sign me up!) Way back during the 2000 Bush-Gore smackdown, I dug around in the data, interviewed undecideds, and called up a passel of experts. My findings were perhaps best (and certainly most entertainingly) summed up by Michael Haselswerdt, then the head of Canisius College’s political science department, who told me: “When it comes to politics, undecided voters don’t know anything. And they’re not going to pay attention long enough to learn anything.”

Read More:
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2012/09/23/undecided-voters-are-a-menace.html

[rock]

1. I believe you have correctly characterized the undecided but

rather than seeing them as a menace I see them as a statistical wobble. If they haven't decided by now then it's going to be equivalent to a coin-toss.

Welcome aboard! Stay while.

[1GirlieGirl]

2. There's no such thing as an undecided voter

It's a myth. Like the Loch Ness Monster. Or like the myth that Willard has a soul. 4 years ago I first heard the myth of the undecided voter. I don't know why people like to say they're undecided. Maybe it's for attention. But I don't believe in the myth.