In (sort of) praise of undecided voters

A Minutes Decision – Hutch and Kathy

My initial response to this commentary about undecided voters was intense frustration.

These people are more articulate than the ones in the SNL skit. But honestly, not that much. They all give reasons for their undecided status. And yet, it’s hard to discern what actual reasoning process is going on.

The basic theme is that these voters don’t much like Romney, but are so concerned about the economy that they’re considering voting for him.

But one thing that you will not see anywhere in that article is what precisely they think Romney will do to improve things. Even more, there really isn’t any coherent articulation of what the problem even is. Yes, ‘the economy’ isn’t doing well. But what does that actually mean? I don’t get the sense that anyone really knows.

Now, that’s not necessarily bad. I don’t expect people to have complicated theories about aggregate demand or QE3 and so forth. But it still drives me crazy to consistently hear people engage in this sort of self-analysis without any clear signal that they even grasp just how much they’re putting on faith.

If you’re going to vote on the economy, don’t you think it would be important to lay out precisely what the guy who is supposed to be better on the economy will do?  My sense is that this does not even occur to most as being a problem.  In their minds, the president has far more power than in reality.  So failure at the macro-level must therefore be evidence of some individual failing.  Starting from that premise, the decision process mostly involves grabbing ahold of whatever campaign narratives bolster your position.

Weirdly, I actually have a lot more sympathy for the people who give reasons that (in my opinion) are clearly incorrect or crazy. For instance, Melinda in Iowa says: “a lot of handouts to people that take advantage of the system. I am concerned Obamacare will just take my money so I can pay for others. Now, I do believe many people deserve assistance, but I wish that there would be more investigation into who actually is getting assistance and I feel that Obama has not done enough in regards to this.” Now that’s just silly (again, in my opinion). But at least it’s a demonstration of a broad ideology. The kind of person who would say something like that is the kind of person who is just not going to be on board with the Democratic economic agenda – and there’s no real need to articulate specific objections. The reason she is undecided is that she values cultural issues a lot. That makes sense. If economic times are good, that sort of person is going to prioritize the other stuff, but when things are bad and the person in charge has a different attitude toward economics, then you’re going to start doling out the blame.

Another theme is that they want to focus on the individual person over the party dynamics of that person.  Many of these people seem like folks who prefer Democrats to Republicans, but are contemplating holding their nose in hopes that Romney will be more moderate.   This isn’t a crazy idea, but it does often stem from a misunderstanding of just how party-dominated our system has become.  You aren’t voting for the individual; you’re voting for the party and there’s an individual who gets dragged along with it.

All that said, there’s something strangely wonderful about these undecided voters, and the intense work they do to communicate the reasons for their undecidedness. After all, there are a lot of ‘undecided’ voters who are undecided in the sense that they simply don’t care enough to make a decision. The undecideds that we’re talking about are the ones who believe it’s a significant civic duty to vote. And they take the obligation seriously.

As political scientists, we can tear our hair out about unreasonable expectations of these voters.  But we need to also remember that elections work perfectly well even if the only thing they do is reward/punish candidates for the general conditions under their watch.  And we can also diagnose what’s ‘really’ going on underneath the reasoning.  But that doesn’t make the perception of responsibility and care any less real.  These people are committed to American democracy and are putting a lot of work into fulfilling their role.

And you have to respect that.