Every four years, the actors and observers of U.S. politics descend upon a single group of people, the undecided voters of America.
We devote thousands of pages of digital ink to profiling undecided voters, scrutinizing their beliefs, examining their motives and working furiously to find the issue or concern that might flip them from undecided to having made a decision.
And the actual campaigns, of course, devote endless resources — hundreds of millions of dollars — to identifying undecided voters and converting them, as much as possible, to the ranks of the decided.
This year, CNN’s Harry Enten notes, there are very few undecided voters. “It’s kind of hard to believe, but the bottom line is that 4 percent, 4 percent in the average of polls, 4 percent of voters say that they are undecided,” Enten said. “That is just half the level that we saw in 2020, well less than the 10 percent we saw at this point in 2016.”
Even with so few undecided voters, it’s hard to imagine who they are. It’s not just that we live in an age of deep partisan polarization, but that it seems unreasonable to think that anyone could be undecided about Donald Trump. He has been, for close to 10 years, a nearly omnipresent figure in American life. He served four years as president and, after he failed to keep himself in the White House, refused to leave the national stage. There’s almost no new information to learn about his beliefs, priorities or ability to do the job. There aren’t, at this point, any questions left to ask the man. Either you want him in office or you don’t.
Still, there are those voters who can’t decide. For reasons more idiosyncratic than not, they cannot bring themselves to pass judgment on either candidate. Or at least that’s the conventional wisdom. But there’s a chance we’re getting this all wrong. There’s a chance these voters aren’t “undecided” at all. Rather, they represent a portion of the large segment of Americans who don’t see politics as an interest worth having.
One of the distortions inevitably produced by political media is the idea that most Americans are highly engaged with partisan politics. When we want a sense of the typical person, we look to social media or go into the field to talk to people wherever they’re available, from diners and churches to rallies and other political events. But the kind of person you see on social media, or the kind of person who is willing to talk to you, a stranger, about her political views in real life, falls into the same category of American as the people telling the stories and building the overarching narratives, that is, people who care about politics and who have, in one way or another, made it a part of their identity. Those people, “the deeply involved” according to the political scientists Yanna Krupnikov and John Barry Ryan in “The Other Divide: Polarization and Disengagement in American Politics,” represent a distinct minority of all Americans.
The deeply involved, the authors explain, are people who spend “a tremendous amount of time following politics,” who “see significance in political events in a way that a person who is merely interested may not,” and who are more likely to express their political views to others.
Most Americans aren’t like this. More than half of them, Krupnikov and Ryan note, “are at least somewhat disengaged from politics.” And even those you might classify as engaged based on their survey responses “fall far short of the behaviors associated with deep political involvement.”
There are any number of reasons that would explain why someone may be less interested in politics. Chief among them is time. “Being deeply involved in politics requires time, and for many, time may be a difficult-to-attain luxury — or it may be time that they wish to spend in other ways on things like their family or their careers,” they write. Partisan polarization is real — and the strong dislike of partisans for the other side is even more real — but journalistic impressions notwithstanding, it’s less equally distributed across the entire population than concentrated among the deeply involved.
If the most fundamental divide in U.S. political life is between “a minority of Americans who are deeply involved in politics” and “the majority of Americans who have much less investment in day-to-day political outcomes,” then the undecided voter is a little less harder to understand. They may simply belong to that majority of Americans who would rather spend their time and devote their attention to something other than politics.
But to have interests other than politics, to be less involved, is not to be disengaged. People in this position have preferences; they care about outcomes; they want to participate, when it’s appropriate, in the political process. “The distinction between the deeply involved and everyone else,” Krupnikov and Ryan observe, “is about the politics that happens between elections and major crises: the myriad governing details, debates and supposed scandals that emerge on a near-daily basis.”
The undecided voter has tuned out the noise of American politics and continues to tune it out until the minute, or even the moment, at which she has to make a decision.
As much as this dynamic is frustrating to those of us who have never had to decide because we’ve already made up our minds, the loose attachment to politics and political life isn’t necessarily an evil. “One can be civically competent through a reliance on political cues — which one can glean from more limited exposure to politics,” Krupnikov and Ryan write. You don’t need to be a news and political obsessive to be an informed voter and a good citizen. And remember, to be deeply involved is to be polarized. It is to be “very confident and very certain,” they add, that you know the best course of political action; it is “to be less likely to bend when faced with the beliefs of other people who are also deeply involved.” The compromise and moderation of governing might depend, in fact, on a world in which most people are at least a little indifferent to politics.
I don’t want to celebrate the undecided voter — that is a bridge too far for me — but it is worth the effort to remember that they play an important part in this process, as annoying as it is to deal with people who won’t make up their minds.
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