WHOM DO NUMBSKULL UNDECIDED VOTERS HURT?: Adam Nagourney writes in today's Times that:
From a tactical point of view, undecided voters present a special challenge to the campaigns because of their disinterest toward politics. The Annenberg poll found that 55 percent said they were not following the campaign closely or at all, compared with 32 percent of the general electorate in swing states, which has produced a bit of a conundrum for both campaigns.
The suggestion here is that ignorant undecided voters are a problem for both candidates. But this doesn't seem quite right to me (not least because campaigns are a zero-sum game). For one thing, the article reports that most of what these undecided voters know about the candidates at this point can be reduced to: Kerry is a flip-flopper, Bush is a national security hawk. At that level of "knowledge," Bush clearly has the advantage.
More importantly, the article also says that these undecided voters tend to be sympathetic to environmental regulation, supportive of abortion rights, and, while they oppose gay marriage, they apparently don't feel strongly enough about it to support a constitutional ban. A majority of these voters also supported the war in Iraq, but think it's going badly enough that we should withdraw our troops as soon as possible. If that's right--and this is Nagourney's profile of undecided voters, not mine--then isn't the clear implication that more information would benefit Kerry and hurt Bush? Or, put differently, isn't the implication that the Bush campaign would want these voters to remain in the dark about the candidates' records and positions (especially the fact that it was the Bush administration's incompetence that created the current mess in Iraq), and that the Kerry campaign would benefit from the albeit tricky task of educating them?
The dynamic seems similar to 2000, when the superficial storyline--which, by definition, is particularly powerful among those (i.e., uninterested, undecided voters) who don't make an effort to get beyond superficial storylines--was that Bush and Gore were both moderates. Only the Gore campaign had an interest in dispelling that myth and, alas, it wasn't very successful...
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