The Mind of the Undecided Voter

Christopher Hayes, who is the D.C. political editor of The Nation magazine, posted a blog entry on his experiences in Wisconsin in 2004 with undecided voters. It is a very fascinating article. Now obviously his experiences are with a non-scientific sampling of such voters. He was in Wisconsin to work for an environmental organization that was trying to help elect progressive candidates in Wisconsin. He wasn't there to conduct scientific surveys. His observations, though, are very interesting.

These are some conclusions he came up with about undecided voters:

Undecided voters aren't as rational as you think.
Undecided voters do care about politics; they just don't enjoy politics.
The worse things got in Iraq, the better things got for Bush.
Undecided voters don't think in terms of issues.

The following quote from the article is Hayes's concluding paragraphs:

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?

Liberals like to point out that majorities of Americans agree with the Democratic Party on the issues, so Republicans are forced to run on character and values in order to win. (This cuts both ways: I met a large number of Bush/Feingold voters whose politics were more in line with the Republican president, but who admired the backbone and gutsiness of their Democratic senator.) But polls that ask people about issues presuppose a basic familiarity with the concept of issues--a familiarity that may not exist.

As far as I can tell, this leaves Democrats with two options: either abandon "issues" as the lynchpin of political campaigns and adopt the language of values, morals, and character as many have suggested; or begin the long-term and arduous task of rebuilding a popular, accessible political vocabulary--of convincing undecided voters to believe once again in the importance of issues. The former strategy could help the Democrats stop the bleeding in time for 2008. But the latter strategy might be necessary for the Democrats to become a majority party again.

There is, of course, another way to look at this and that is the view that voting is not an intellectual decision but an emotional decision. Once you accept that premise, his conclusions begin to make more sense. That's not to say that there aren't million of voters who make primarily intellectual decisions when voting. It is to say that most human decisions result from a combination of reason and emotion, and in some cases the reason side of the equation is stronger and in others it isn't.

A drawback to the Hayes article is his apparent belief that decided voters are somehow making more intellectual decisions than undecided voters. This overlooks the fact that even for decided, partisan voters, their choices have emotional overtones. Most Democrats and most Republicans have intellectual reasons for choosing one party over the other, but they also have emotional reasons. For a lot of committed partisans they choose one party or the other because it "feels right", not just because they think it is right.

In any event, the article is quite fascinating, even if you don't agree with all his conclusions.