The Undecideds

While post-election wrap-up is beginning to tire (although I may have one piece forthcoming shortly), I did find one article quite recently that was relatively interesting. In The New Republic online Christopher Hayes, a freelance writer who spent the last seven weeks of the electoral campaign trying to convince undecided voters to vote for John Kerry, explains some of the general conclusions he formed as a result of his experiences.

Hayes comes up with five conclusions, which I’ll mention below:

1. Undecided voters aren’t as rational as you’d think.
2. Undecided voters care about politics, they just don’t enjoy politics.
3. A disturbing number of voters are crypto-racist isolations.
4. The worse things got in Iraq, the better they got for Bush.
5. Undecided voters don’t think in terms of issues.

I think the first four points are relatively simple. The first one speaks to voters who are misinformed and unwilling to listen to the facts. This refers to issues that aren’t debatable, like which candidate might have better fought the “war on terror,” but instead deals with stories such as that of a woman who switched from Kerry to Bush because Bush supported stem-cell research. There is really no way to argue that Bush supports stem cell research more than Kerry does. Several factors ranging from the media to general discourse to one’s upbringing have combined to influence a person’s viewpoint in a way that makes it impossible to try to stimulate debate by introducing new facts to the equation.

The second point states that these people do care about politics as they mean to vote, but they just view it the way most of us view laundry or the dishes. They are going to wait until the last possible moment to do it, and not spend as much time on it as many other people.

The third point makes the unsurprising and troubling point that many people view the world in a Samuel Huntington mindsight. These are the people you encounter who suggest, “Nuking the Middle East,” or just going in there without any concern whatsoever for human life that isn’t that of an American soldier. While this occurred more commonly with undecideds who leant towards Bush, it also occurred with a number of Kerry supporters.

From what Hayes encountered many conservatives were more than willing to recognise the failures of the Bush administration in Iraq, but these failings had the weird effect, probably helped by a less-than-clear picture from Kerry, of stimulating support for Bush. People viewed the situation as one that would not see progress in a long time. They saw the failures and instead of wanting to hold Bush accountable they said, “Well, things won’t get any better over there so what’s the point in switching.”

The last point is the most interesting, I think. Hayes claims that he encountered a whole set of undecided voters who were unable to make the distinction between what is political and what is not. They drew the line so narrowly they were unable to see the wide-ranging effect politics has on almost every aspect of your life.

More often than not, when I asked undecided voters what issues they would pay attention to as they made up their minds I was met with a blank stare, as if I'd just asked them to name their favorite prime number.

The majority of undecided voters I spoke to couldn't name a single issue that was important to them. This was shocking to me. Think about it: The "issue" is the basic unit of political analysis for campaigns, candidates, journalists, and other members of the chattering classes. It's what makes up the subheadings on a candidate's website, it's what sober, serious people wish election outcomes hinged on, it's what every candidate pledges to run his campaign on, and it's what we always complain we don't see enough coverage of.

But the very concept of the issue seemed to be almost completely alien to most of the undecided voters I spoke to. (This was also true of a number of committed voters in both camps--though I'll risk being partisan here and say that Kerry voters, in my experience, were more likely to name specific issues they cared about than Bush supporters.) At first I thought this was a problem of simple semantics--maybe, I thought, "issue" is a term of art that sounds wonky and intimidating, causing voters to react as if they're being quizzed on a topic they haven't studied. So I tried other ways of asking the same question: "Anything of particular concern to you? Are you anxious or worried about anything? Are you excited about what's been happening in the country in the last four years?"

These questions, too, more often than not yielded bewilderment. As far as I could tell, the problem wasn't the word "issue"; it was a fundamental lack of understanding of what constituted the broad category of the "political." The undecideds I spoke to didn't seem to have any intuitive grasp of what kinds of grievances qualify as political grievances. Often, once I would engage undecided voters, they would list concerns, such as the rising cost of health care; but when I would tell them that Kerry had a plan to lower health-care premiums, they would respond in disbelief--not in disbelief that he had a plan, but that the cost of health care was a political issue. It was as if you were telling them that Kerry was promising to extend summer into December.

To cite one example: I had a conversation with an undecided truck driver who was despondent because he had just hit a woman's car after having worked a week straight. He didn't think the accident was his fault and he was angry about being sued. "There's too many lawsuits these days," he told me. I was set to have to rebut a "tort reform" argument, but it never came. Even though there was a ready-made connection between what was happening in his life and a campaign issue, he never made the leap. I asked him about the company he worked for and whether it would cover his legal expenses; he said he didn't think so. I asked him if he was unionized and he said no. "The last job was unionized," he said. "They would have covered my expenses." I tried to steer him towards a political discussion about how Kerry would stand up for workers' rights and protect unions, but it never got anywhere. He didn't seem to think there was any connection between politics and whether his company would cover his legal costs. Had he made a connection between his predicament and the issue of tort reform, it might have benefited Bush; had he made a connection between his predicament and the issue of labor rights, it might have benefited Kerry. He made neither, and remained undecided.

In this context, Bush's victory, particularly on the strength of those voters who listed "values" as their number one issue, makes perfect sense. Kerry ran a campaign that was about politics: He parsed the world into political categories and offered political solutions. Bush did this too, but it wasn't the main thrust of his campaign. Instead, the president ran on broad themes, like "character" and "morals." Everyone feels an immediate and intuitive expertise on morals and values--we all know what's right and wrong. But how can undecided voters evaluate a candidate on issues if they don't even grasp what issues are?

We aren’t talking about a sizable percentage of the population here, so I don’t think the Democrats should be radically altering their electoral approach to appeal to these sorts of voters. However, this raises the very interesting question of how do you reach out to someone who fundamentally doesn’t grasp the nature of politics? At this point I’m really not sure how you’d do that. I’ve always thought it was clear when listening to political speeches or reading analysis exactly how different parties have different approaches that lead to different results. It seems that it’s not, and I don’t know how, or even if, one can address that point.