Undecided or uninformed?

This column is being written one day before the election and the final opinion polls are showing something that is somewhat puzzling, but all too common.

President Barack Obama seems to have a slight edge over Governor Mitt Romney in the presidential race, and in the U.S. Senate race, Senator Scott Brown and challenger Elizabeth Warren are in a dead heat. That’s interesting, of course, but not the puzzling part.

What’s confounding is, right before the election, there are still a million undecided voters in the presidential race and 100,000 who can’t decide in the senate contest.

Why the heck can’t these people make up their minds?

First of all, this is nothing new. In virtually all races at any level of government there is always a small percentage of the electorate going into the last days of an election who are undecided, usually five percentage points or less. Some actually make up their minds as they’re standing in the voting booth and in a close race, these late deciding voters can provide the winning margin.

In a National Journal article Sunday, some voters expressed typical reasons why they can’t decide who to support in the presidential race. One woman said the current administration “hasn’t done enough” and Obama has “broken promises.” A man said he didn’t think “there’s much difference in what they actually would do” and “both are pretty bad.”

A still undecided Massachusetts voter in a University of Massachusetts/Boston Herald poll said he was “not overly enthused” about either Brown or Warren, but “was sick of all the ads” weeks ago.

Surely there are major differences between these two sets of candidates.

Obama has been president for nearly four years, has tried faithfully to pursue his agenda in the face of strong opposition by Republicans and has a clear philosophy and record. Some of the highlights include the new national healthcare law, the auto bailout, the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act, the stimulus package and the elimination of the Don’t Ask Don’t Tell policy.

He also ended the war in Iraq, set a date certain for withdrawal from Afghanistan and killed Osama bin-Laden and many other Al Qaida leaders.

Romney has less of a public record to run on and has purposefully been vague about his economic and tax policies. And he has been a flip-flopper on a host of other issues, trying to appear to move closer to the center in recent weeks, while heartily blasting Obama on many of the president’s initiatives.

But nobody could realistically say there’s not much difference in the candidates or what they would do if elected. Obama would seek to continue on the left-center path he started in his first term and Romney, in spite of his flip-flopping, would lean strongly to the right and try to undo much of what Obama has done, especially the healthcare law and various regulations.

Getting much less press coverage, the senate race is a little harder to figure out. But by now pretty much anyone should know that Brown is a right-center politician who claims to be one of the most bi-partisan senators in Washington, opposes Obamacare, and says he wants to create jobs and reduce bureaucracy and the debt. Warren is a professor and consumer activist on the left side of the political spectrum who would fight to retain Obamacare and strong regulation of corporations and establish a fairer tax policy that doesn’t skew benefits to the wealthy.

Even this little bit of information should be enough to help convince a voter who to support in the senate race.

Easy to complain

Sure, it’s easy to complain about political ads or say you’re not enthused about a particular candidate or offer up a thousand other excuses why you can’t make up your mind. But the true reason why the undecided can’t seem to decide was best shown in a Saturday Night Live skit broadcast in September. Cast members portrayed undecided voters as earnest, well-meaning folks who just had a few questions they wanted answered before they felt comfortable casting their ballots.

Questions like:
“When is the election?”
“What are the names of the people running?”
“Who is the president right now? And is he or she running?”
“How long is a president’s term of office? One year? Two years? Three years? Or life? If it’s for life, frankly, we’re not comfortable with that!”

Like most good satire, the SNL skit was over the top, but it certainly got to the heart of the matter.

Voters who are still undecided in the days right before an election generally aren’t stupid or bad people or even incurable cynics. They just aren’t paying attention.

They should.

Posted by Bruce Garlow on November 8, 2012. Filed under Berkshire Beacon Hill Spotlight,Columns,Opinion. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can leave a response or trackback to this entry