The Mystery of the Undecided Voter

The Undecided Voter in the 2008 election.
....think of being on an airplane. The flight attendant comes down the aisle with her food cart and, eventually, parks it beside my seat. “Can I interest you in the chicken?” she asks. “Or would you prefer the platter of shit with bits of broken glass in it?” - David Sedaris in the New Yorker Magazine.

The Barack Obama 30 minute commercial airing on 5 major US TV netoworks was clearly aimed at bringing in those fikle last hour undecided voters, less than a week away from the November 4 Presidential election.

But after vertially years of campaigns, debates, endless news time, endless tv ads and peopel to people discussion....why are there still an estimated 5-10% of the voting public yet to make up their minds.

Turns out, most undecided voters are not very smart, uninformed and tend to be female.

"Undecided voters are less educated, less affluent, and somewhat more likely to be female than the average voter," a Pew research poll on undecided voters found.

But one scientist who studies decision making thinks the oppsoite, that undecided voters are the smartest of the bunch.

"People tend to think of them as dolts, because how could they not have gathered enough evidence by now?" Neuroscientists Joshua Gold told Reuters.

"But from a purely rational standpoint, it makes perfect sense not to commit until you go into the voting booth because you can collect as much information as possible."

But another scientist belives that undecided votes may have alreaddy made up their minds, but dont actually know it yet, from New Scientist:

Bertram Gawronski, a social psychologist at the University of Western Ontario in London, Canada, and his colleagues asked 129 residents of Vicenza, Italy, whether they would support a controversial proposal to enlarge the city's US military base.

To measure subconscious biases, the team used an "implicit association" test to record, for example, whether volunteers associated pictures of the base with positive words such as "joy" or negative ones such as "pain".

When polled a week later, many who were undecided about the base in the first poll had resolved to support or oppose it - and the team found that their decision could be predicted by their responses on the association test (Science, vol 321, p 1100).

Another agrees, political sceintist Harwood McClerking.

He believes a good portion of those who say they are undecided have made an unconscious decision already -- and will "come home" and vote according to their demographic group.
That is, a white church-going man from the U.S. South will tend to vote Republican, while an urban educated woman in the Northeast will tend to vote Democrat.

But McClerking also believes there's an added racial element to the undecided voters this year: that many of them have already ruled out Obama but are afraid of saying so for fear the interviewer will think they are racist.

"My personal rule of thumb, when I look at a poll, is I take roughly half of (the undecided portion) and add it to the white candidate, to give me a sense of what is really going on," said McClerking, a professor at Ohio State University.