Insight into the mind of the undecided voter..

[crispini]

Jeez, you'll just plotz when you read this:

http://www.tnr.com/doc.mhtml?i=express&s=hayes111704

some excerpts:

(snip)
My seven weeks in Wisconsin left me with a number of observations (all of them highly anecdotal, to be sure) about swing voters, which I explain below. But those small observations add up to one overarching contention: that the caricature of undecided voters favored by liberals and conservatives alike doesn't do justice to the complexity, indeed the oddity, of undecided voters themselves. None of this is to say that undecided voters are completely undeserving of the derision that the political class has heaped on them--just that Jonah Goldberg, and the rest of us, may well be deriding them for the wrong reasons.

Undecided voters aren't as rational as you think. Members of the political class may disparage undecided voters, but we at least tend to impute to them a basic rationality. We're giving them too much credit.

(snip)

Undecided voters don't think in terms of issues. Perhaps the greatest myth about undecided voters is that they are undecided because of the "issues." That is, while they might favor Kerry on the economy, they favor Bush on terrorism; or while they are anti-gay marriage, they also support social welfare programs. Occasionally I did encounter undecided voters who were genuinely cross-pressured--a couple who was fiercely pro-life, antiwar, and pro-environment for example--but such cases were exceedingly rare. 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.

(read more, it's good)

[pk_du]

1. Fuck - almost makes you want to take their votes away

but that would be facist -sorry.

[Anakin Skywalker]

2. Makes me want to bitch-slap some sense into them!

[KT2000]

3. A wise old friend told me

that there are a lot of people who want to vote for the winner. (A more apt name might be "followers.") This race was so close that the undecideds couldn't figure out who was going to win.