For months, we’ve been hearing that people’s minds are already made up about the 2024 presidential election, that nothing could change the mind of people who had strong feelings, one way or the other, about Donald Trump and Kamala Harris. In September, a writer for NPR was saying that only a “tiny slice of the electorate is considered persuadable” and presumably those numbers are even smaller now.
With the election virtually upon us, and no vote-altering October surprise to speak of, some people on social media are expressing exasperation with still undecided voters, including former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee, a Trump voter who asked, “Who are these undecided voters? What ... are they still undecided about?”
There’s a good answer to that question even in normal years: Undecided voters are often people who aren’t hyper-tuned to politics, who aren’t perpetually online or viewers of cable news. For them, politics tends to be background noise, something they pay attention to on a “need to know” basis, and that “need to know” only becomes pressing on Election Day.
But this is not a normal year, for reasons beyond the two assassination attempts on a Republican candidate who remains under criminal indictment, and the unorthodox process by which the Democratic candidate came to be on the ballot without winning a single primary. If ever there was a year to be undecided on the eve of an election, this would be it. According to columnist George Will, no fan of either Trump or Vice President Kamala Harris, “Voters face the worst presidential choice in U.S. history.” One might argue that the still undecided voters are taking the election even more seriously than the rest of us, believing that there is moral weight in the decision that demands certainty — certainty that may never arrive.
National Review’s Charles C.W. Cooke is among those who chose to deal with the dilemma by voting, but leaving the presidential line blank; Cooke has said he does not think “that refusing to vote for Trump necessitates voting for his opponent.”
But when thoughtful people choose not to vote, it can be argued that they’re leaving important decisions in the hands of people who might not be as well informed. Jason Brennan, a philosophy professor at Georgetown University, is among those who believe that society is better off when it’s the low-information voter who stays at home. In light of this argument, it could follow that well-informed Americans have an even greater moral imperative to vote.
Adding to the angst of the still-undecideds is the fact that that while all votes are equal, some are more equal than others, with apologies to George Orwell.
Undecided voters in states that are already assured to go either for Harris or Trump may believe that they can vote for a no-shot candidate like Jill Stein or Cornel West, or write in the name of the neighbor, without consequence. They may well be right. In 2016, Utah Gov. Spencer Cox couldn’t bring himself to vote for either Trump or Hillary Clinton and wrote in someone else; Trump won Utah by more than 200,000 votes.
In swing states, however, that’s a dicier prospect. Officially, a single withheld vote in Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin might not swing the 2024 election. Unofficially: well, every snowflake in an avalanche pleads not guilty.
Yanna Krupnikov, a professor of communication and media at the University of Michigan, and a faculty associate at the Center for Political Studies at the Institute for Social Research, has studied undecided voters and notes that people who tell pollsters they are undecided may actually not be. In other words, the “tiny slice” of the electorate that the campaigns and their proxies are frantically trying to court this weekend may be even tinier than we think.
“People use ‘undecided’ to convey many things,” Krupnikov told me. It may not be they haven’t decided which candidate they prefer, but that they haven’t yet decided if it’s even worth the effort to vote at all.
In fact, it could be hard to distinguish protest non-votes like Cooke’s from the millions of people who won’t vote because they’re too busy or simply uninterested. Per the Associated Press, despite record turnout in 2020, 75 million people who were eligible to vote didn’t cast a ballot, and only 3 in 10 Americans say they “almost always” vote in elections.
Undecided voters are sometimes thought of as the “worst” voters, Krupnikov said — as evidenced by people saying on social media, “I can’t believe these people still don’t know.” But, Krupnikov, the co-author of “The Other Divide: Polarization and Disengagement in American Politics,” said, “There’s also a world, especially early in the cycle, where they are considered the best voters — they aren’t just taking (the side of) a political party; they’re really thinking about their options.”
In other words, if you’re still staring at an unmarked ballot today, or even on Tuesday, it might not mean you’re indecisive or a procrastinator. It could just mean that you’re smart.