Waiting for Josephine the Undecided to Make Up Her Mind

After a nail-biting, emotionally-draining year of watching what some people call the most gripping election campaign of modern times, the election now comes down to the opinion of the much-touted undecided voter. Who is this stubbornly indecisive population and why are they taking so long to make up their minds?

Untold millions have been spent by the candidates in trying to woo this elusive electoral subset, who now stand poised as the true deciders in this election year's final hours. Pundits have talked themselves hoarse attempting to characterize their bias and pin down their final leanings. Whose attention wasn't riveted by the little squiggly lines on the screen during the CNN televised version of the debate, the output of 30 undecided voters and their handheld response-dialers? And yet, despite the fact that they clearly were pleased or displeased with the two candidates' performance, at the end of the evening many of them remained steadfastly undecided. Who wouldn't hold out on making a decision if but to bask for a bit longer in the steady outpouring of national, even international, attention?

Even now, on the very eve of the election, some 6.4 percent of voters still cannot make up their mind for whom they will be casting their vote. Even after the many dozens of debates, the two conventions, the endless interviews, television appearances, newspapers articles, radio spots, the differences between the two candidates laid out in such sharp relief, these voters still haven't figured it out. At this late stage of the game, you have to be trying pretty hard to avoid paying attention to the campaign, suggesting that maybe these undecideds never intended to vote in the first place.

And Andrew Kohut of the Pew Research Center has discovered just that--the undecided voters are in large part people who will not be voting on Tuesday. Kohut says that undecided voters typically fall into three general categories: those who are torn between the candidates, those who disengaged and not following the campaign, and those who are nonvoters.

Kohut's research finds that a majority of the voters are women, at 63 percent. Many are less educated and more religious than their more decisive counterparts, and they also tend to make less money, so maybe don't have as much time to be obsessing over politics. Of those who will cast a ballot, Kohut finds that they will be divided fairly evenly, with a slightly higher tendency to vote for McCain than voters who have already made up their minds.

Some polls show that in the swing states, such as Florida and Missouri, the number of undecided voters is larger than the lead of either candidate. So it seems that by playing coy, we will all be waiting breathlessly to see just how Josephine the voter decides to vote, if she votes at all. And perhaps we all should thank her for keeping us all so busy these last months. Without the undecided voters, the candidates wouldn't have had anyone to spend their ad dollars on, Gallup wouldn't have had anyone to write their debate questions for the last debate, and we wouldn't have had any reason to keep watching this campaign so intently to its very end. So thank you for adding some suspense to what would otherwise have been a foregone conclusion to this election year!

Seed Newsvine

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