The fabled “undecided voter” gets a bad rap in SNL’s Digital Short this week (granted, so has the Chronicles of Narnia and President Ahmadinejad in the past). But amazingly, SNL’s dumbed-down undecideds—“What happens when the President dies? Anyone thought of that yet?”—is more accurate a portrayal than not.
It’s also not the first group to seek artistic inspiration from undecideds. From the New Yorker’s helpful analysis last month:
Undecided voters tend to get a bad rap. “To put them in perspective,” the author David Sedaris wrote in Shouts & Murmurs shortly before the election of 2008, “I 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?’ ”
Or to put it another way: “After two years and billions of dollars, our presidential election is going to come down to a few undecided voters in key swing states,” Stephen Colbert joked recently. “The fate of our country in now in the hands of people who don’t think about what they want until they get right up to the register at McDonald’s.”
But the New Yorker also details the efforts of Larry Bartels (super-legendary PoliSci theorist) in his hunt for the demographic breakdown of so-called undecideds. Remember, undecideds are not the same as Independents (I shudder from the memory of making that mistake in a certain PoliSci Prof’s office hours and the ass-kicking that ensued. I still have the night terrors…). Independents are sometimes said to suffer the “Middle Class Effect”—give voters the option of identifying as one, and hugely disproportionate numbers of them will self-identify as such.
Where SNL gets it right, however, is the age-range of undecideds. Bartels’ findings seem aligned with those of PrioritiesUSA Action Adviser Paul Begala, who writes that contrary to our conception of an “undecided voter” (whatever that is), most are in fact young working class professionals, often raising kids and, increasingly, single.
Pollsters tell us swing voters are mostly women. They are younger—which blows away the myth that the president has the youth vote locked up. Older voters, like older consumers, are just more set in their ways. Young people are more persuadable about nearly everything. Many swing voters have a high-school diploma but no college degree. And a chunk of them are Hispanic. So forget about your Uncle Carl, the older white guy who complains endlessly about Obama being a Muslim Marxist. And ignore Aunt Clara, who pines for single-payer health care and is suspicious of Romney’s religion. Focus instead on their daughter-in-law Carlotta, the younger Latina who hasn’t been able to afford college because she’s working her rear off and raising kids.