The Myth of the Undecided Voter

If You Don't Know Who You're Going to Support, See a Doctor

Prior to Campaign 2024, only once before in U.S. history have two men who have served as president of the United States run head-to-head against one another in an election. That was in 1892 when former president Grover Cleveland ran against incumbent Benjamin Harrison.

There was one other occasion when two men who had been elected ran against one another. That was in 1912 when President William Howard Taft ran for reelection in a three-way contest that also included former President Theodore Roosevelt and the eventual winner, Woodrow Wilson. But that is hardly the same as what happened in 1892 and what is happening this year, when voters are able to compare two men who served full terms as America’s chief executive side-by-side.

It makes this year’s debate very different from all those that have come before. Because in all those debates dating back to the very first general election presidential debate in 1960, one of the central roles that the debate played was enabling voters who were not highly familiar with the candidates to get to know them and their thinking.

That is not going to happen this year.

Given the limitations of media coverage of candidates and politics in the Cleveland-Harrison election in 1892 it is fair to say that we have never had a contest for this country’s highest office in which so many Americans not only knew both candidates well, but they knew how they would perform in office.

Don’t Lie to Me, I’m Your Substack Friend

In fact, let’s go further, shall we? For any voter to say at this point that they are undecided about whether to vote for Biden or Trump suggests one of several possible scenarios. The first and in some ways the most charitable is that they are lying. They may be lying because they think “undecided” is the right kind of answer to give a pollster. They may be lying because they are playing hard-to-get, because they want the candidates to work for their vote. They may be lying because have been out of the country, locked in a prison camp in a cell without Internet, newspapers, books or talkative cellmates. Or they may have some kind of serious neurological injury of the kind we just don’t joke about anymore. (Like for example, they were repeatedly dropped on their head as a child.)