Since writing my original essay on this subject two days ago, I have looked more carefully into the question of whether there has been professional research on the recurrent political phenomenon of “undecided voters” – i.e., research other than that reported by the Daily Show. I’ve discovered there has been, though not very much. One of the major recent studies has to do with cognition.

In an article entitled “Automatic Mental Associations Predict Future Choices of Undecided Decision-Makers,” published in the 22 August 2008 issue of the journal Science (subscription only), research psychologists Silvia Galdi, Luciano Arcuri, and Bertram Gawronski reported that undecided voters “sometimes have already made up their mind at an unconscious level, even when they consciously indicate that they are still undecided.” (See this summary.)

In a supporting commentary in the same issue of Science, “The Unseen Mind,” Timothy D. Wilson and Yoav Bar-Anan argue that respondents' answers to political pollsters’ questions “are highly suspect. Voters explain their reasons by relying on cultural and idiosyncratic causal theories that may bear little relation to the real reason for their preferences. . . . Pollsters should be equally skeptical of voters who say they are undecided, because they may have already made up their minds at an implicit level.”

I had conjectured in my original essay that one reason for the undecided-voter phenomenon was cognitive in nature – that undecided voters were people who had trouble making decisions about almost everything. The above studies suggest that many undecided voters have indeed made up their minds – but at an unconscious level. They lean one way or the other, but they don’t know that they have already made a decision.

An excellent"opinion" piece in the Los Angeles Times (12 October 2008) by Ezra Klein, “Undecided Voters?,” sums up some other research; for example:

“Jeffrey Jones of the Gallup Organization . . . reported after the 2004 election that they [undecided voters] tended to be less educated, more rural and somewhat older than most voters." [But compare this. ]

Klein continues: “Many of those who claim to be undecided are not. Some don't want to admit their preference. In their paper, ‘Swing Voters? Hah!’ political scientists Adam Clymer and Ken Winneg amassed substantial data suggesting that very few undecided voters are truly indecisive. Examining the 2004 election, Clymer and Winneg found that even the most hard-core of undecided voters were fairly predictable.”

An additional reason for the undecided-voter phenomenon is that the TV news media want to keep alive the apparent fiction that there are lots of undecided voters out there who are “swing voters.” This supposedly makes uncompetitive races competitive, thus increasing the drama of these races, encouraging us to watch TV coverage and punditry.