Who’s Still Undecided Between Harris and Trump?

One of the great rituals of U.S. presidential-election coverage is the convening of undecided-voter focus groups by media outlets during and after debates and other big moments. Sometimes these folks seem completely detached from what they are talking about, as though they were parachuted into the studio from a distant planet with a completely different political system. Other times, some of them sound like they are trying to play pundit with sage observations about the unfolding campaign. And still others play coy, clearly enjoying their role as the Great Deciders of close elections.

But how much do we know about undecided voters and how many of them there actually are? Are there really that many people who look at Donald Trump and Kamala Harris and have trouble distinguishing what they offer as a potential president? It’s a rather important question in a contest that could quite possibly come down to a few thousand voters scattered across multiple battleground states (in 2020, 44,000 votes redistributed in three states would have produced a tie in the Electoral College).

Ron Brownstein delved into this question in The Atlantic and quickly made a key distinction:

When most people think about a voter still trying to make up their mind, they probably imagine a person who is highly likely to vote but uncertain whether to support Harris, Trump, or a third-party candidate. Both political parties, however, are more focused on a different—and much larger—group of undecideds: potential voters who are highly likely to support Harris or Trump, but unsure if they will vote at all.

Campaigns typically describe the first group of reliable but conflicted voters as persuadable; they frequently describe the second group as irregular voters. Persuadable voters get the most attention from the media, but campaigns recognize that irregular voters can loom much larger in the outcome—especially in presidential elections when more of them ultimately participate.

Allocating resources between these groups can be a difficult decision. Without a doubt, a truly undecided voter who is certain to vote has double value to the candidate who can both win that vote and deny it to the opponent. But as Brownstein reports, this is not remotely as large a group as polls sometimes report:

“There is an immaterial number of ‘certain to vote’ people who are undecided,” says the longtime GOP pollster Bill McInturff, whose firm has conducted the NBC poll along with a Democratic partner for decades. This is a view widely shared among strategists in both parties.

Mike Podhorzer, a former AFL-CIO political director who has built a large audience among Democrats and progressive groups for his detailed analyses of voting behavior, says that traditional polling questions significantly overstate the number of voters truly up for grabs between the parties. “There are people who will say that they are undecided in a survey,” Podhorzer told me, “and it’s just not true.” Podhorzer says that in polls he’s commissioned over the years, he always asks voters whether they have mostly voted for one major party or the other in the past.

There are a lot more irregular than undecided voters these days. But all other things being equal, irregular voters are more likely to show up in presidential elections than in others. In the 2020 presidential contest, 158 million people voted, achieving the highest turnout rate since 1900, despite fears associated with voting during a pandemic. In 2018, 118 million people participated, the highest midterm turnout since 1914 (112 million voted in 2022). So any impression you might have that potential voters are too disgruntled to get off their couches and vote may not be accurate.

In a presidential year, then, lots of irregular voters will show up in any event, and without question, high turnout became vastly more likely when a Biden-Trump rematch that didn’t strike a lot of voters as interesting turned into a very different contest between Harris and Trump. What the campaigns have to figure out is what they can do to maximize turnout by their irregular voters. And at the same time, while the number of truly undecided voters is invariably exaggerated, it’s estimated that 4 to 7 percent of the electorate is genuinely undecided right now. That’s enough to determine the outcome of an election as close as this one. But undecided and irregular voters don’t necessarily have the same needs. Brownstein’s sources identify the typical undecided voter as Republican-leaning but Trump-skeptic, the kind of people who might have backed Nikki Haley in the 2024 GOP primaries. This helps explain why the Harris campaign has spent so much time securing and advertising endorsements by prominent Republicans, and why the Trump campaign is determined to label her as an extremist who should horrify centrists.

But will swing-voter appeals reduce enthusiasm to vote among the irregular voters? The advantage Trump has is that his “persuasion” pitch is pretty much the same negative rap on Harris as his “mobilization” pitch. Harris’s undecided-voter message may not be as congenial to the irregular voters — particularly young voters — who have their own ideological itches that need scratching, as the Sunrise Movement’s Paul Campion told Brownstein:

Campion sees a fundamental conflict between Harris’s attempts to reassure centrist swing voters, by emphasizing moderate positions on energy from fossil fuels and on the war in Gaza, and her need to activate more progressive young voters uncertain whether to vote at all. “Young people want to hear Harris articulate over and over again more forcefully how she will fight for them and listen to their demands,” Campion told me.

In the end, Harris may have the more complicated task of balancing positive messages that distinguish her from both the 45th and the 46th presidents with negative messages that convince non-Trump Republicans and irregular voters alike that a second Trump administration is unacceptable. Donald Trump is too old and set in his ways to develop nuance at this late stage in his career. He will express his rage to all kinds of voters and let the chips fall where they may.