In a presidential election where voters are extremely polarized and the two candidates have contrasting views, most voters know which side they will take months in advance.
Then there are people like Faith.
A middle-aged manager at a substance abuse treatment center in southern Pennsylvania, she voted for Donald Trump in 2016 and Joe Biden in 2020.
This year, she’s one of millions of voters in battleground states still deciding which way to vote, or whether to vote at all, who will likely decide the election’s outcome.
Speaking in a focus group with swing voters, Faith said she disliked Trump’s “bullying and arrogance” – the reasons she turned against him four years ago – but was unsure how she felt about Kamala Harris.
“Harris is saying all the right things, but I’d like to know a little more about who she is as a person,” said Faith, who, like others in the focus group I observed last week, asked that her last name not be used. “She talks about the ‘opportunity economy,’ and I’d like to know what that means.”
Most polls don’t have an “undecided” option, making it hard to know exactly how many voters are still eligible to vote, but pollsters estimate the number is between 5% and 10% of the electorate.
That stubborn minority is enough voters to decide the outcome of an election that could be decided in seven battleground states.
Who are the indecisive people who find it difficult to choose between apparently disparate candidates?
They fall into several categories.
Some of them, but not all, are “low-information voters” — people who are only now beginning to pay attention to the election campaign.
“A lot of these are people who don’t follow politics very closely or at all,” said Republican pollster Whit Ayers, “and they only think about politics when they have to decide who to vote for, or whether to vote at all.”
The rest are so-called “dislike-both-candidate voters,” a category that a poll last month put at 15% of voters, though that number is probably falling.
“These are people who are paying attention to politics and don’t like what they see,” Ayers said.
In 2016, they were a crucial factor in tipping the election towards Trump, and in 2020, they helped tilt it again towards Biden.
Additionally, there are independent companies that focus primarily on .
“They want an answer to the question, ‘What are you going to do to put the country on a better track economically?'” said Republican pollster David Winston.
And some, like Faith of Pennsylvania, don’t like Trump but remain hesitant to vote for a Democrat like Harris, who sometimes leans toward the party’s progressive wing.
“There’s a part of me that looks up to Dick Cheney, Mitt Romney and John McCain,” Faith said.
I sat in on three focus groups, all drawn from voters who supported Trump in 2016 and Biden in 2020. Two of the groups were organized by a polling company for the media organization Axios. The third was organized by a dissident Republican group, Republican Voters Against Trump, but the participants were not members.
Most of the 20 swing voters were not completely undecided, but nearly all said they needed to make a judgment call before making a decision, especially about Harris.
“I don’t want Trump to be president again,” said Jennifer, who works for a nonprofit in Wisconsin, “but with Harris, I feel like I don’t know enough about her and what she stands for.”
Brian, 39, who lives in the western suburbs of Atlanta, said he initially leaned toward Trump but changed his mind after Ms. Harris performed well in the 2015 presidential election, and he still wants to hear more about her campaign.
“I think she needs a clearer policy,” he said. “I feel like hers has been vague.”
“The economy was better under Trump,” he said, but added that the Republican candidate “needs to act as president and come out with facts, not lies.”
Rich Thau of Engagious says he’s noticed some patterns in the dozens of similar focus groups he’s convened.
“This is a fight between people they don’t like and people they don’t know,” he said. “There’s a big lack of awareness of Harris’ economic plan, and she’s just beginning to fill that big void.”
“Voters who are struggling in this economy often have fond memories of the Trump era,” he said. “They think Trump could do a better job of dealing with the economy, but they can’t stand him. So for them, it’s a 50-50 choice.”
The lesson for candidates to take from these voters, at least, is clear.
To appeal to undecided voters, Trump needs to tone it down, stop promoting the idea of eating cats and dogs, and strengthen his financial resources. Instead, he seems to be leaning more and more toward lies and conspiracy theories.
And Harris needs to tell us more about her. The good news for her is that undecided voters are listening, and many of them are looking for a reason to vote for her.
