This election will probably be decided by a tiny fraction of the electorate in eight or nine states. The undecided voters in those states are popularly portrayed as people who just can’t make up their minds.
But that’s not quite right. They aren’t so much “undecided” as uninterested and, frankly, uninformed; in political-science parlance they are “low information” voters.
It’s worth stopping here to clarify something: “uninformed” does not mean “dumb.” We’re all uninformed about certain topics. You wouldn’t believe how little I know about, say, baseball.
Lynn Vavreck, a political scientist at the University of California at Los Angeles, says that uninformed voters have roughly the same relationship to politics that I have to baseball.
To people personally invested in politics, the homestretch of the campaign appears loaded with the kind of political information that could change voter opinions. There are debates, a flood of ads, inevitable gaffes, the crush of election news — maybe even an October surprise or two. But undecided voters are precisely those least likely to tune in to the debates, which helps explain why debates typically have little effect on elections. They’re the least likely to care about a gaffe — or even to know when one has occurred.
Vavreck has been tracking a group of 44,000 voters since December 2011. When she started, 94% were already leaning toward a candidate. Of the 6% who were truly undecided, 33% now say they’re going with Mitt Romney and 37% with President Obama. There’s little reason to believe that undecided voters in this campaign will break sharply toward one candidate. If Obama is going to turn this into a rout, or if Romney is to salvage a win, it will probably require changing minds that are already made up, or increasing (or suppressing) turnout among base voters.
In other words, don’t expect the votes of the mythical undecideds to actually be decisive. It’s likely to be the decided who will, well, decide.