An undecided voter walks into a bar. He says to the bartender, “You got anything to eat?” The bartender says, “Just bar food.” The voter says, “Can I see your menu?” The bartender says, “No menu. We only got two choices – steak sandwich with A1 sauce, or a raw sewage hoagie with shards of glass.” A silent minute goes by. Finally the voter says, “I need to study the ingredients of the steak sauce.”
I’ve been writing jokes to avoid tearing my hair out. I veer toward the latter every time I see a quote from an undecided voter – like “Stephanie,” who tells the New York Times that she’s leaning toward Trump because Kamala Harris has yet to “elaborate” on what she plans to do about “medical care.”
Or “Romnel,” who texted a focus group leader that Harris and Trump are basically the same because “they don’t seem to have any clear economic project.”
Or “Mark,” who watched the Harris-Trump debate and told a focus group that “I still don’t know what she is for.”
Or Bret Stephens, the NY Times columnist, who says that even though he detests Trump, Harris is no better because “we don’t know her answer to anything.”
I’ll belabor the obvious and point out that it takes roughly 90 seconds of online sleuthing to discover where Harris stands on medical care, the economy, and pretty much anything. And even if we were to mistakenly assume that undecided voters are thirsting for granular specifics, I’d have two answers for that: (1) Policy wonks Hillary Clinton and Al Gore were big on specifics and look where it got them, and (2) The binary choice in ’24 is between Harris, who just released a 76-page economic policy plan, and Trump, who when asked the other day what specific actions he’d take to protect Michigan jobs, responded with a long, elaborate lie about how he was once named Michigan Man of the Year.
The undecideds basically fall into two groups: Those who are somehow gtorn between Harris and Trump (torn between a normal human and a convicted felon), comprising roughly 4 to 7 percent of the likely electorate in the handful of swing states; and those who likely favor one candidate over the other, but who are just as likely to sit out the election. The latter group is much larger than the former. Lest we forget, roughly 80 million registered voters sat on their asses in 2020.
It beggars belief that the future of this nation, the fate of our republic, may well hinge on our most ill-informed and apathetic citizens. Conservative commentator Mona Charen, who worked in the Reagan White House, frames this crisis better than I can:
“Knowing that the outcome will turn on a few thousand not-terribly-knowledgeable voters in seven states makes the hair on the back of your neck stand up. It presents difficulties for those of us who believe that persuasion still matters in politics, because if you’re setting out to make a case against Trump now – after everything the past nine years have wrought – you just want to throw up your hands. What more is there to say?”
Indeed, what more is there to say to people who can’t grasp the basic difference between Harris and Trump on the economy? What more is there to say to people who don’t know or care or understand that Trump’s plan to slap tariffs on foreign goods would damage the economy because those tariffs (i.e., import taxes) would be passed on to American consumers in the form of higher prices? Minimal mental cognition is required to connect those dots.
These feckless citizens have long been grist for mockery – in 2012, Saturday Night Live cast members dressed up as undecided voters and demanded to know, “What are the names of the two people running? And be specific!” – but we’re in crisis mode now. The only solution, assuming it’s feasible, is for the Harris campaign to convince a sufficient share of those 80 million stay-at-homes that the stakes this election are truly existential.
Which brings us back to Bret Stephens, the Times columnist who surfaced earlier this month on Bill Maher’s show to complain that even though he won’t vote for Trump, he just doesn’t have enough specifics about Harris, so he might stay home. But another guest, cable host and ex-financial CEO Stephanie Ruhle, slapped him upside the head:
“When you move to Nirvana, give me your real estate broker’s number…Kamala Harris isn’t running for perfect. She’s running against Trump. We have two choices. And so there are some things you might not know her answer to. (But) in 2024, unlike 2016, for a lot of the American people, we know exactly what Trump will do, who he is and the kind of threat he is to democracy.”
How hard is that?