SEARCHING FOR THE UNDECIDED VOTER

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http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/comment/2012/08/searching-for-the-undecided-voter.html

***SNIP

Two political scientists, Larry Bartels, of Vanderbilt University, and Lynn Vavreck, of U.C.L.A., recently tried to figure out who those few voters still up for grabs actually are. They sifted through multiple surveys, involving a total of ten thousand respondents, and came up with a sample of five hundred and ninety-two people who truly seemed undecided. Bartels and Vavreck determined that only thirty per cent of the undecideds were genuine Independents, while forty per cent lean Democratic and slightly more than twenty per cent lean Republican.

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.”

Bartels and Vavreck’s research suggests that this rap rests on a solid foundation. The undecideds, they write, “are rather less knowledgeable about politics, and much more likely to say they follow news and public affairs ‘only now and then’ or ‘hardly at all.’ (Almost 40 percent are unsure which party currently has more members in the House of Representatives, and another 20 percent wrongly answered that it was the Democrats.)”


Read more http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/comment/2012/08/searching-for-the-undecided-voter.html#ixzz22fMjyuTN

[B Calm]

1. Undecided voters blow my mind. .