Undecided Voters

IN PRE-ELECTION POLLS, many respondents declare themselves as undecided. These voters, also called swing voters, are usually a sizeable minority, ranging between 10–20 percent. Undecided voters undermine polls' precision, but more importantly, they can change the fate of an election. Polls normally have a two percent margin of error, while the percentage of the undecided vote is usually in the double digits. Some pollsters ignore undecided respondents, as if they remain undecided and will not show up to vote. This assumption is obviously wrong for the countries where voting is mandatory, and has proven largely inaccurate even for countries where voting is not mandatory.

Other investigators prefer to split them based on the other responses in the sample. There are, however, several examples when undecided voters made the difference in contests. In a 1978 gubernatorial campaign, for instance, the polls indicated a landslide victory of percent for one candidate, and only six percent for his opponent. The election results, however, suggested that most of the 28 percent of undecided voters voted for the underdog, since the final tallies showed that only percent of the votes went to the favorite. Given that the winner was an incumbent governor, many experts believe that the undecided voters did not want to disclose their choices. The same phenomenon was noticed in some mayoral races that pitted African-American and white candidates against each other. In these polls, most of the undecided white voters ultimately voted for the white candidate. Different techniques are used to encourage people to express their preference during polls. One, used by Gallup, replaces the face-to-face interview with dropping a ballot in a box. Another is to ask for the softer preference, for example, which candidate the interviewee leans toward.

Although undecided voters are common in all democracies, they exert the largest influence in plurality systems, such as those of the United Kingdom and the United States. In presidential elections in the United States, for example, most of the states will predictably vote for Republican or Democratic candidates. Candidates can win only few additional states, the battleground or swing states. Candidates will spend a considerable amount of time and money to attract undecided voters in battleground states, neglecting their constituents in other states.

Candidates and their political advisors try to identify undecided voters and battleground states. Although battleground states change over time (from example, Illinois and Texas, which were once battleground states, but are now a blue and red respectively), battleground states are relatively stable and easy to identify based on [Page 808]previous elections. It is much more difficult to identify undecided voters. In general, they tend to be white, less engaged in politics, with a low- to middle-class income. In the past, the undecided voter was located in the center of the political spectrum, and political discourse tended to cater to centrists. Now, swing voters have no one dominant issue that they care about, but, rather, they are loosely interested in multiple areas, which might include the Iraq War, abortion, stem cell research, same-sex marriage, and gun control. With no candidate clearly overlapping with their positions, they have a hard time deciding upon a candidate. The soccer mom and the NASCAR-fan dad have been depicted as decisive swing voters for George Bush's electoral victory in the 2000 presidential election. Attracting swing voters also served Bill Clinton well in the 1992 and 1996 campaigns. However, in the 2004 presidential election, the George W Bush campaign focused less on capturing the undecided voters, and more on driving up the turnout rate of its own natural voting base.

...