Sonny Bunch asks an interesting question in response to Obama’s waste of money clever final appeal to the nation:

Are the few remaining undecideds really going to be swayed by soft focus personal interest tales?

I don’t mean to berate undecided voters yet again, but…well, yes, I do.  The sort of cloying, saccharine, “I understand your problems” presentation Obama offered is probably much closer to what undecided voters find most satisfying, and it isn’t just the undecided voters who respond to these things.  Undecided voters trick pollsters and political writers with their traditional complaints that the candidates are not “specific enough,” when specificity and wonkery are the last things they want.  These voters have standard responses that they use when they are talking to pollsters, journalists and focus group leaders.  We’ve heard them all.  They say, “They’re just saying the same old things” or “it’s just politics as usual” or “they’re not talking about what matters to me.”  An undecided voter will say the last one even when the candidate has directly addressed a subject that the pollster or journalist knows for certain matters to him.  The biggest flaw in attempting to reach these remaining undecided voters through a half-hour paid political ad is the assumption that undecided voters are likely to watch a half-hour paid political ad.  One of the distinguishing features of being an undecided voter is a lack of attention to and interest in the election.  Those who have a greater interest have already aligned themselves with one candidate or another by this time.    

It is not as if undecided voters are savvy consumers of campaign literature who are torn between the promise of McCain’s health care tax credit on the one hand and Obama’s pledge to incorporate labor and environmental standards in future Latin American trade deals on the other.  These are not typically people who tie themselves into knots because they feel drawn to different aspects of the two platforms, or find both candidates’ policy addresses compelling in different ways.  These are not the people who ponder the virtues of future card check legislation.  There is a reason political ads, including those that last for half an hour, are consistently unsatisfying to people who actually pay attention to the campaigns.  Especially at this stage of the election, they are geared to appeal to people who pay very little attention to the election and whose interest in and information about policy are minimal.

The latest Pew poll confirms this portrait of undecided voters:

On most issues, the positions held by undecided voters fall between those of Obama and McCain supporters, although they are somewhat more similar to McCain supporters on the issue of illegal immigration. Overall, these voters are more likely than supporters of either candidate to say they don’t have an opinion about most issues [bold mine-DL].  

Undecided voters do clearly distinguish themselves from supporters of both McCain and Obama in their lower levels of participation and interest in this election, and partisan politics in general. A majority (51%) of undecideds do not identify with either the Republican or Democratic parties and fewer than half (48%) report having voted in the primaries this year; by contrast, 63% of both Obama and McCain supporters say they voted in a primary. 

Fewer than four-in-ten undecided voters (37%) say they are following news about the election very closely.

As Chris Hayes discussed in his item on undecided voters four years ago, the undecided do not have opinions about most issues because they do not think in terms of issues:

These questions, too, more often than not yielded bewilderment. As far as I could tell, the problem wasn’t the word “issue”; it was a fundamental lack of understanding of what constituted the broad category of the “political.” The undecideds I spoke to didn’t seem to have any intuitive grasp of what kinds of grievances qualify as political grievances.    

Who are these people?  Per the Pew poll, half of the undecideds have a high school education or less, almost two-thirds are women, and three-quarters make $75,000 a year or less.  If most undecided voters watched Obama’s infomercial, this profile suggests that many will probably have come away with a favorable impression. 

Bunch also asked these questions:

Wouldn’t they be more interested to know how Obama plans on paying for all his new policy proposals while maintaining lower tax rates for the middle class? Wouldn’t they be interested in hearing just how Obama would extricate our troops from Iraq in a reasonable manner?

The answer for most undecided voters is no, they wouldn’t be interested, because these things do not interest them.  That is not to say that they are indifferent to the realities in question, but detailed plans aren’t what they want to hear, either.  When political bloggers, pundits and journalists ask these questions on behalf of undecided voters, we are explaining what we wanted to hear Obama say.  Obama did not persuade many high-information voters last night, because most of these voters at this point are no longer persuadable and have already chosen their candidate.  In any case, they were not Obama’s target, because they do not constitute the bulk of the undecided vote.

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