Picture yourself near the front of a long line at an ice-cream shop. You’re getting close—but there’s this guy. He’s parked himself at the counter and seems truly baffled by the 30 tubs of flavors. “Do you mind if I sample one more? Maybe the mint chip? Or, no, how about the double-chocolate fudge?” You know this guy. We all know this guy. The toddlers behind you are getting restless. He gives one more flavor a try, sucks on the little spoon, and shakes his head. Has he never had ice cream before? Does he not have a fundamental preference between, say, chocolate and vanilla? Does he not realize that we are all waiting for him to make up his fickle mind?
This is the undecided voter: a figure of hair-pulling frustration, the man whose face you want to dunk in the tub of butter pecan. The majority of Americans likely can’t comprehend how anyone would look at Donald Trump and Kamala Harris and see gradients of gray. A fairly common consensus about these people, as one poster on a Reddit thread recently put it, is that they must be either “enormously stupid or willfully ignorant.”
But I don’t think they are either. Look again at that guy in the ice-cream shop. He is seeking out more information. He is not lazily falling back on the flavor he always orders. He doesn’t seem ignorant, just genuinely confused about how to make the best, tastiest choice. Interviews with undecided voters reveal people struggling with a dilemma. Take Cameron Lewellen, a voter in Atlanta who spoke with NPR. He seemed very well informed. He’s interested in whose policies would be most advantageous for small businesses. He even watched the recent debate with a homemade scorecard. The decision, he said, “does weigh on me.” Or Sharon and Bob Reed, retired teachers from rural Pennsylvania, two among a handful of undecided voters being tracked by The New York Times. Interviewed for the Daily podcast, they expounded knowledgeably on the war in Ukraine, tariffs, and inflation. But, as Sharon put it, “I’m not hearing anything that’s pushing me either way.”
So if they aren’t checked out, what is holding them up? Perhaps undecided voters are just indecisive people. As I read interview after interview, they began to sound more like that friend who’s been dating someone for seven years but just can’t figure out if he’s ready to commit, or that relative who goes down an internet rabbit hole of endless research every time they need to purchase anything—like, even a new kettle—incapable of pressing the “Buy” button.
According to Joseph Ferrari, a social psychologist at DePaul University who studies indecision, this is a type. After synthesizing research conducted in a wide range of countries, Ferrari has found that 20 percent of any given population are what he calls “decisional procrastinators.” “Twenty percent may not sound very high,” he told me. “But that’s more than clinical depression, more than alcoholism, more than substance abuse, more than panic attacks.” Ferrari said the indecisive are afraid to make a choice, because they worry about the consequences, about failure—so they stall in all kinds of ways, including by seeking more and more information. This is, he insisted, a learned behavior, particularly prevalent among people who grew up with “cold, demanding, stern” fathers who reprimanded them for their wrong choices. “They produce people who tend to be indecisive,” he said.
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Or maybe, as Barry Schwartz, the author of The Paradox of Choice, put it to me, some of these undecided are “maximizers”: those people “who look at 2,000 pairs of jeans online before they buy one.” Schwartz created a scale for figuring out who the maximizers are, and it seems plausible to him that some voters might fall into this category. Choosing among an endless number of jeans is one thing, but “suppose instead you’ve only got two options,” Schwartz asked. “There are dozens of attributes of each option, so it may make it just as complex a calculation … because there are so many dimensions that have to be evaluated. And when you’re looking for the perfect, there are always doubts.”
Seen this way, undecided voters deserve pity, not annoyance.
Once I stopped seeing their inability to choose as somehow self-indulgent, I also began to find it strange that Americans think so negatively of indecision in electoral politics to begin with. Sure, as Ferrari and Schwartz pointed out, there are pathological manifestations of indecision. But the impulse to reserve judgment, to accumulate more data, to really investigate one’s options—couldn’t that also be considered a good thing?
“You can turn this around and say, ‘What would the world be like if there weren’t any undecided voters?’” Timothy A. Pychyl, author of Solving the Procrastination Puzzle, told me. “There’d almost be no point in having an election. There’d be no one to convince; there’d be no reason to debate. And so, in some ways, these people who’ve already decided are either very, very partisan, or they can’t tolerate ambiguity and so they foreclose on a decision.”
Instead of “chronic procrastination,” he thought it was possible that undecided voters were engaged in “sagacious delay”—which is a much nicer way to put it. And when you consider how much tribal sway the parties have on our allegiance, defining our very identities, it becomes even more remarkable that some people are willing to ignore this pressure and choose for themselves.
While many voters now decide on a candidate based on one issue—abortion or Israel, for example—this subset seems to be considering a range of topics. CNN recently reported that when asked what their “top issues” were, 30 percent of undecided voters said “Economy/Inflation” but almost as many, 28 percent, said “No Top Issue.” You can read this as proof that these folks are not paying attention. But what if they have no top issue because they care about a lot of different issues, including some that point them in contradictory directions? What if you believe that Trump will be stronger on foreign policy but don’t trust that he will uphold democratic institutions as well as Harris? Or what if you’re unsatisfied with Harris’s plan for bringing down inflation but also don’t like the way Trump talks about immigrants? The more issues you take into account, the more liable you are to be indecisive.
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These cogitations may sound absurd to many Americans because this time around, as the candidates themselves keep endlessly reminding us, the choice does feel nearly existential, a decision between two diametrically opposed visions of America. Everything else is commentary. But, not, apparently, for the undecided voter.
This commitment to parsing differences in policy and approach could be what we want in a democracy, “closer to the ideal voter,” said Ruth Chang, a professor of jurisprudence at Oxford who studies choice. But this is only true if the questions these undecideds are asking are the right ones. And often, to her, they sound more grounded in self-interest. “Voting shouldn’t be like deciding what you most want for lunch,” she said.
Among the interviews with the undecided, I did hear a lot of that kind of thinking. Who would be best for my family? Who will turn the fortunes of my business around? They often sounded like consumers, and less like citizens, focused on what they could see and feel in their own lives—the Reeds, for example, said they were frustrated that Harris only mentioned economic policies that would affect young voters and said nothing about what she would do for retirees like themselves. Chang’s suggestion? Tell undecided voters to pretend they are God and can take the country down one path or another. Blocking out all the ways they are personally affected, what would be a better direction? This exercise might, admittedly, be hard for them. “They can’t think that way, because they can’t square all the complex factors that they’re intelligently, perfectly aware of,” Chang said. “So they fall back to, ‘Well, what would help my family?’ Because that’s something they feel like they have control and dominion and expertise in.”
People seriously confronting this dilemma are becoming more and more rare, though. According to some CNN number crunching, 10 percent of voters were undecided at this stage in the election cycle in 2016; 8 percent were in 2020; and 4 percent are now. If the trend line continues, the next election will have hardly any undecideds. This is not a good thing. A political landscape marked by absolute decisiveness is, of course, a highly polarized one; it also lacks dynamism, moving us away from reasoned debate and toward emotions, such as fear or joy, that bolster allegiance on one side or the other—essentially all vibes all the time. The undecided might drive us crazy, busy splitting hairs while the house burns, but they capture what elections are for at their most elemental: a chance for citizens to truly consider all their options, and then choose.
theatlantic.com