The Infernal Triangle: Who Are the ‘Undecided’?

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That thing some call the “discourse” has turned, as we swing into the final month of the 2024 presidential election, to the mystery of undecided voters. Potentates of the political press say that’s why Kamala Harris has to talk more about “issues” in interviews with other potentates of the political press. Or else how in the world are undecided voters going to decide who to vote for in five weeks?

That inspires me to return to the most important piece of political journalism I have ever encountered. It came out in 2004 on the website of The New Republic. I was so impressed by it, in fact, that I sought out its author. It turned out he lived in the same city as me, Chicago, scratching out a living as a freelance lefty writer and doing a little theater with his wife Kate. His name was Christopher Hayes, and it has been a joy watching his career flourish ever since.

The future MSNBC host’s TNR piece was an account of the lessons he learned canvassing among undecided voters in Wisconsin for John Kerry. It incinerates a basic foundation of how political junkies think: “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.”

Chris noted that while there were a few people he talked to like that, “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 very concept of the ‘issue’ seemed to be almost completely alien to most of the undecided voters I spoke to.”

You would think others among the veritable armadas of mainstream journalists reporting out what undecided voters think would have met with such blank stares themselves. It is a testament to how bad framing narratives and rigid, ossified genre conventions distort perception so much that no mainstream journalist ever admits such a thing. Instead, they ram voters’ responses into their false frame, square-peg-in-round-hole style. They let objective reality take the hindmost.

But back to the Badger State in 2004.

Hayes: “I tried other ways of asking the same question: ‘Anything of particular concern to you? Are you anxious or worried about anything? Are you excited about what’s been happening in the country in the last four years?’”

But those questions harvested “bewilderment” too. “As far as I could tell, the problem wasn’t the word ‘issue’ … The undecideds I spoke to didn’t seem to have any intuitive grasp of what kinds of grievances qualify as political grievances.”

That’s the part that stuck with me word for word, almost two decades on. Some mentioned they were vexed by rising health care costs. “When I would tell them that Kerry had a plan to lower health-care premiums, they would respond in disbelief … as if you were telling them that Kerry was promising to extend summer into December.”

You would think these experimental results might be easily repeated, any time a journalist canvasses undecided voters. After a few times, you might think journalists might have adjusted how they conceptualize voters, as something besides bundles of issue opinions.

Nevertheless, they persisted.

CNN, September 18: “Harris isn’t giving the specifics some undecided voters say they want.” Multiple that a gajillion-fold, in the way gajillions of marine invertebrates make a coral reef, and you have the structure of agenda-setting in elite political journalism’s discourse about undecided voters and “issues.” Unless Chris Hayes is a very good liar, it bears little resemblance to reality. So what’s going on here, and how could things be better?

ALLOW ME AN ABRUPT TRANSITION. A few weeks back, I spoke to a group of graduate students at the City University of New York’s Newmark School of Journalism. I tried to impress upon them two takeaways.

The first is that mainstream journalism’s rigid genre conventions—granting equal weight to “both sides,” passing on what both say without “editorializing” as to the truth value of the claim, let alone explaining how one side intentionally and skillfully exploits those norms to direct more attention to the lie than to the truth—may have evolved with the intent of delivering maximal fairness and accuracy. But in the here and now, they utterly fail to convey reality. I invited them to imagine themselves as historians 75 years hence, reading, say, front-page articles from The New York Times in 2016. They might conclude that Hillary Clinton was equally as corrupt as Donald Trump, or even more corrupt. Reading newspapers from 2022, they’d suspect that Americans were suffering Weimar-like inflation. Or from this year, when they’d suspect an explosion of violent crime, when crime actually is down.

Or they might conclude that in October of 2024, Kamala Harris lost favor among millions of undecided voters because, after “promising to crack down on supposed price gouging by supermarkets … she skipped over the issue preoccupying millions of Americans in her Tuesday interview in Philadelphia and pivoted to another message.”

Then, digging deep into the sources, they may argue that the picture newspapers conveyed was about as accurate as that served to Soviet citizens by the state newspaper Pravda.

My second point to the students is that journalistic norms are not a suicide pact.

If the authoritarians in control of the Republican Party achieve enough power, they will start methodically knocking off liberal institutions, including politically independent journalism. I told them that I do not envy them, because their generation of journalists faces the staggering burden of reconceptualizing their profession’s inherited rules for delivering fairness and accuracy. Not to do journalism in a way that helps Trump lose, but to do it in a way that lets news consumers accurately grasp this election’s stakes.

Because if they do not, and the #bothsides norms now in place survive unchanged, they might be the last generation of politically independent journalists.

THIS BUSINESS OF “UNDECIDED VOTERS” is a perfect case study. Who are they, and how do they actually decide—if not, that is, by paying attention to issues? I have a theory about that for this particular election, and also the ones in 2016 and 2020, though not knowing any, nor having talked to any, I can only call it a hypothesis. My analysis starts with an astonishing fragment from Donald Trump’s acceptance speech this past summer.

It was the part after he said, “I don’t have wars,” that he stops them “with just a telephone call.” He promised, “We will replenish our military and build an Iron Dome missile defense system to ensure that no enemy can strike our homeland,” that it would be “built entirely in the U.S.,” and would be just like the one in Israel (“Three hundred forty-two missiles were shot into Israel, and only one got through a little bit”), or the one Ronald Reagan proposed “many years ago, but we really didn’t have the technology many years ago.”

Barely any media people mentioned it; no fact-checks from The New York Times, Washington Post, CNN, PBS, nor all three broadcast networks—which was when I stopped looking—thought to debunk it. I suppose because “Iron Dome or no Iron Dome” wasn’t on their bingo card of “issues.” Though I did hear some make fun of what had come next, when Trump, unprompted, said, “Remember, they called Starship, Spaceship? Anything to mock him.”

And it’s true. Every one of Reagan’s expert advisers who wasn’t a kook told him his dream was impossible, so he announced it in a speech without telling them he was going to. $50 billion (in 1980s dollars) was wasted in research; and it was still impossible, as it is still impossible now. Nonetheless, the Soviet Union was so terrified by the speech that it was one of the reasons they put their nuclear forces on hair-trigger alert, leading to a series of misunderstandings that almost ended the world. So when it came to evaluating the proposal on objective terms, the “Strategic Defense Initiative” (its official name) only deserved to be mocked. So, they mocked.

But Mr. Trump: They mocked it by calling it “Star Wars,” not “Starship” or “Spaceship,” you idiot.

But who was the idiot? The next year, despite an endless train of similar idiocies, Reagan won 49 states. How many of his 54,455,472 voters, it would be interesting to be able to know, were undecided between him and Walter Mondale before they heard this stern national father promise a magic shield covering every inch of the skies above our nation that could protect us from evil?

See what I’m saying? Objectively, Trump’s “Iron Dome” deserves nothing but mockery. Israel’s Iron Dome protects a nation of some 8,630 square miles (not counting illegally occupied territory) from rockets that can’t be targeted but are just hurled toward a general vicinity, with explosives made of sugar and fertilizer. Trump’s Iron Dome would have to protect a nation of 3,809,525 square miles from the most sophisticated guided projectiles on Earth, holding 15 thermonuclear warheads with a total yield of approximately 3,000 times the force of the bomb that flattened Hiroshima in 1945.

Objectively speaking, worth nothing but mockery. But subjectively: Why did Trump promise to “build an Iron Dome over our country”? To be sure that “nothing can come and harm our people … It’s America first, America first.”

Millions of pages have been filled by scholars explaining the psychological appeal of fascism, most converging on the blunt fact that it offers the fantasy of reversion to an infantile state, where nothing can come and harm you, because you will be protected by an all-powerful figure who will always put you first, always put you first. It is simply indisputable that this promise can seduce and transform even intelligent, apparently mature, kind-hearted people formerly committed to liberal politics. I’ve written before in this column about the extraordinary film The Brainwashing of My Dad, in which director Jen Senko describes the transformation of her Kennedy-liberal dad under the influence of right-wing talk radio and Fox News—and also how, after she explained the premise of her film for a Kickstarter campaign, scores of people came out of the woodwork to share similar stories about their own family members.

I’ve learned a lot about the psychological dynamics at work from the X feed of a psychologist named Julie Hotard, who drills down on the techniques Fox uses to trigger infantilization in viewers. The people at Fox who devise these scripts, one imagines, are pretty sophisticated people. Trump’s gift is to be able to grunt out the same stuff just from his gut. Trump’s appeals have become noticeably more infantile in precisely this way. When he addresses women voters, for instance: “I am your protector. I want to be your protector … You will no longer be abandoned, lonely, or scared. You will no longer be in danger …”

Or when he grunts the other side of the infantilizing promise: that he will be your vengeance. His promise to destroy anything placing you in danger. Like when he recently pledged to respond to “one really violent day” by meeting criminals with “one rough hour—and I mean real rough. The world will get out and it will end immediately.”

Or when he posted the Prayer to St. Michael the Archangel (“O Prince of the heavenly hosts, by the power of God, cast into hell Satan, and all the evil spirits, who prowl about the world seeking the ruin of souls”) illustrated by a 17th-century painting of said saint curb-stomping a defeated devil, about to run a sword through his head.

Even on the liberal-left, many interpret the way Trump seems even more to be going off the rails these last weeks as a self-defeating lack of control, or as a symptom of cognitive impairment. They almost seem to celebrate it. The New Republic’s email newsletter, which I cannot stand, is full of such therapeutic clickbaity headlines canvassing the same examples I talk about here: “Trump Proposes Stunningly Stupid Idea for Public Safety”; “Ex-Aide Says Trump’s ‘Creepy’ Message to Women Shows He’s Out of Touch”; “Trump Appears to Have Lost a Total Grasp on Things.”

I certainly don’t disagree that Trump is becoming more cognitively impaired and out of touch with reality. But might not these impairments render him a better fascist seducer, as his invitations to infantile regression become ever more primal, ever more basic, ever more pure?

Thus, finally, my hypothesis about undecided voters.

I imagine that what at least some of them—certainly more than those supposedly entering the two candidates’ issue positions onto spreadsheets to study, ruling out the candidate not “specific” enough about their fiscal policies—are undecided because they are poised at a threshold. “Undecided” is a way station between the final surrender to the Trumpian fantasy, and all the imaginary comforts it offers, and sticking with the rest of us in the reality-based community, despite all the existential terrors the real world affords.

Is my theory correct, or is it nonsense? Honestly, I can’t say—or can’t say without the kind of resources reporters from The New York Times, Washington Post, or the network news operations enjoy. Because to figure that out, you’d have to talk to people. I mean really talk to people. Which means, first, earning enough of their respect and trust to get them talking about how they really see the world.

Like, in 2004, Chris Hayes did—unburdened by the rigid conceptual frames that make it impossible to see politics as it is, instead of how our agenda-setting elite political journalists wish it to be.