Originally published at: Jon Stewart on the bewildering denial in remaining an undecided voter - Boing Boing
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Undecided sometimes means: I don’t want to tell you my preference because people always seem to get mad at me when I tell them.
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Robert Reich has (as usual) some good insights on this problem.
In addition to feeling when it comes to voting for a black woman, ahem, “uncomfortable,” a big reason that many voters aren’t hearing much about Harris is that Tromp is doing his usual strategic thing of flooding all zones with outrageousness, and thus, gobbling up nearly all of the media oxygen.
I half wonder if that was the whole point of, for example, the “Illegals are eating pets!” thing.
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That’s an excellent thoughtful piece and thank you for linking it!
Reich finishes it up with a factor which i suspect might be of lamentable significance:
I can’t help wondering how many Americans who continue saying they “don’t know” or are “undecided” about Harris are concealing something from pollsters and possibly from themselves: They feel uncomfortable voting for a Black woman.
that is, they will only admit to being “Undecided” rather than be overt about their misogyny and racism
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To spell out “uncomfortable” even more, yep, that’s it-- a double dollop of racism + misogyny.
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If a voter is a bigot of some variety or is a greedpig billionaire, I can at least understand why they’d vote for Il Douche. But undecided and unable to see the difference between the candidates? That’s either a very stupid and ignorant person or a bigot who doesn’t want to admit it.
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They think it makes them sexy, is another factor.
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And another type of undecided are the last minute folk. Many of them aren’t paying any attention even now. And they probably won’t pay attention until November.
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I remember some previous research that showed that “undecided” voters were all over the place ideologically- It’s less that they’re not sure what side they’d align with, and more not sure whether they’ll turn up or not.
source
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If then.
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British polls (used to? Not sure they have to any more) factor for what they called “shy Tories”. Those people who didn’t want to admit to being nakedly racist, sleazy, homophobic etc. but were ruled by the concept of “I want lower taxes”.
The sort of people who have private health insurance that costs multiples of the tax cost of a well funded national health would cost.
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Ugh. And here I thought “playing hard to get” went out with bell bottom jeans.
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I suspect you may be exactly right about that for a decent subset of “undecided” voters. It’s hard for me to wrap my head around given the stakes, but there are people I know who simply say that they are “uninterested in politics”. 
They don’t strike me as ill-intentioned or lazy. They’re just busy handling all the craziness that their lives throw at them, and think that politics is corrupt, that policy is boring, and that their votes probably won’t make a meaningful difference. And they’re so used to political hype and exaggeration that when something genuinely alarming comes along, it’s easy for them to shrug it off as just more partisan rhetoric.
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It had, some time ago, become clear to me that “undecided voter” (as used by the media) was a euphemism for something extremely nasty. Jon understates it.
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Or “Undecided” is shorter to say than “None of your damn business.”
Saying “undecided” to an in-person pollster could be the new “click” to a phone pollster or “block” to a text message political message. [Even if you’re asking for support for a candidate I’m inclined to support and plan to vote for already, if you send an unsolicited political text to me your message gets deleted and your number blocked immediately as a matter of principle.]
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I’ve heard voices in Sarah Long’s undecideds focus groups who seem to think it’s cool to hate both parties equally – the “they’re both corrupt” people. These are the people who most make me want to punch a wall. If you can’t tell the difference between the two parties at this point in 2024, you’re either willfully ignorant or hiding behind your wall of cynicism to mask your bigotry.
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If they aren’t paying attention now, I don’t believe they will pay attention in November, either.
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I would think the opposite; telling a pollster or a campaigner that you’re “undecided” is letting them know that you’re still potentially open to persuasion, which means that you’ve just become a priority target.
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I had this served up to me yesterday by the youtube algorithm and it’s scary that it is once again relevant…in an unfunny ironic way.
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Well done but wow, was it only 3 years ago that longer attention spans allowed for such things to go at a slower pace like that, for so much longer? 
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