Undecided Voters Aren’t “Deciding” Anything
It would be easy to rejoin that things have always been this way. American voters and politicians have seldom been very articulate; and this has sort of worked out. Maybe so, but Trump was not hatched from nothing. For one, we have endlessly more information at our fingertips about the electoral process than ever before. Just as it is the very consumption of the news that consolidates partisan identities, our informational surfeit also serves to discredit the authority of the electoral process by shining an unforgiving light on its every aspect. From how people make up their minds, to how voter rolls are established, to how ballots are filled out and mailed, to how Dominion voting machines work, to how election results are certified: the more we know, the more visible the margins of human error therein. (How could it be otherwise in a process involving more than 150 million voters and hundreds of thousands of election officials, many of whom are themselves now invested in discrediting the process?)
Moreover, our digital media environment is now national, such that it’s much less clear how people’s individual experiences should reliably inform their vote. When undecided voters say that the economy is bad or that they just don’t know Harris well enough—when they repeat national talking points—it’s not exactly clear why these should count as well-founded reasons even for them. (Is the economy specifically bad for this person? Worse than the alternative? Have they made an effort to find this out? Do they know how a president can actually affect the economy? And how and why do they weigh the economy as more significant than all competing concerns?) But nor is it clear what could count as satisfactory reasons to vote otherwise even in principle. Around and around we swarm. Information is the wonder of our age in many ways. It just happens to also undermine the possibility of political trust, consensus, and legitimacy.
A brief analogy: Contrary to expectations, the introduction of video assistant refereeing into soccer inflamed controversies about games rather than forestalling them. Similarly, the stupendous availability of information in our political lives—and the desire to render it decisive—sows division, conflict, and conspiracy. Information feels like it could be just neutral. In theory, we’re each in a position to verify it. But in practice, we’re collectively just not that capable or interested. We fall back on trusting the voices that strike a chord with us. I am not saying that these voices are equivalent. Just that Trump is what will keep happening, so long as we think our political judgments should rest on (more) information alone.
