Inside the Minds of Undecided Voters

You’ve heard about them for months. The press obsesses about them. Political scientists toil to understand them. The campaigns are consumed with trying to win them over. They are undecided voters—and at a time when Americans are being blitzed by 43,000 political ads a day, according to the Campaign Media Analysis Group, they remain stubbornly impervious to persuasion. Who are these people who hold the country’s fate in their hands? And why can’t they make up their minds?

Campaign professionals think of undecideds as comprising two distinct groups: one whose members follow the news and have still found cause to withhold their support, and another that has yet to tune in and may not until the debates. The first group is “not nearly as partisan as those who’ve already picked a candidate,” says John Brabender, chief strategist in former Senator Rick Santorum’s presidential campaign. “They swing their vote much more often. Many are actually registered as Republican or Democrat but have only a loose connection to their party.”