More than other voters, they tend to be young, and Black or Hispanic. They get more news from social media than most voters do. They worry about their economic security.
And they use phrases like “lesser of two evils” to describe the choice between former President Donald Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris.
These are the undecided, the unhappily committed and the uncertain voters who could make the difference in this tight presidential election.
Although most Americans are firmly in one camp or another, about 18% of likely voters nationwide have not definitively made up their minds, according to the latest New York Times, Philadelphia Inquirer and Siena College poll.
A sliver of them are truly undecided; they do not know how they will actually vote. Others say they have made up their minds, but they acknowledge that their preference may not stick once their ballots are in hand.
The uncertainty and detachment of these voters can confound the campaigns. Some will change their minds, perhaps more than once, before Election Day. Others may not vote at all. Their indecision has drawn some scorn from partisans on either side.
A picture of them is emerging that helps explain, sometimes in contradictory ways, why they remain uncommitted. Their opinions, reflected in polling and interviews, suggest that long-standing voting patterns in the Democratic coalition are shifting in this election. And the undecideds are challenging old perceptions of how identity influences voting.
These voters are more likely than committed voters to be young, Black or Latino, and struggling financially. They ranked the economy as their No. 1 concern.
In any other recent election, many of the undecided and unhappy would have been natural Democratic voters. But their deep disillusionment with the last four years under President Joe Biden is making that Democratic lean less of a sure thing. They say they trust Trump over Harris to handle the economy by a 40-percentage-point margin.
“Formula is expensive. Clothing is expensive. Diapers are expensive. Rent is expensive,” said Viviana Christie, 23, a hair stylist and paramedic from Essex County, New Jersey, and the mother of twin six-month-old boys. “You name it. It’s all expensive.”
She blames Democrats for an economy that she described as “a wreck” and said she now regrets voting for Biden in 2020.
Most unconvinced voters put the economy far above issues like abortion and immigration that motivate the bases of either party. But Christie, who is Hispanic, is also balancing other concerns. And her fear of losing access to health care — including the possibility that Republicans will enact a national abortion ban — is pushing Christie halfheartedly toward Harris.
Uncommitted or unenthusiastic voters also tend to be less affected by Trump’s inflammatory rhetoric.
It’s not that they don’t care. In interviews, they said that they were bothered by his attacks on immigrants, including the false claims he made recently about Haitians, and by the tropes he uses about Black Americans. They do not, however, consider that disqualifying.
Jayson Villarouel, a 22-year-old senior at Kennesaw State University in Georgia, said he was bothered by Trump’s whitewashing of the attack on the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. Likewise with Trump’s race baiting. “That’s my biggest thing with Trump: He incites,” he said.
Villarouel, who is Black and plans to join the military after graduation, admires Harris’ restraint. “Harris, her strengths lie with keeping the country civil,” he said.
But he added that worrying about corrosive rhetoric when the world was going sideways seemed like a luxury the United States could not afford.
He said he was anxious about global tensions and the possibility that war could break out between the United States and China. “I think it’s the state of the world that’s just causing people to turn an eye to the ignorant stuff he says,” Villarouel said.
That is not an uncommon point of view. The Times/Inquirer/Siena poll found that voters nationally prefer the way Harris conducts herself over Trump, with 54% saying she had the temperament to be an effective president. But they also said they thought Trump was more respected by world leaders.
When Biden was the Democratic Party nominee, one factor that made the race especially fluid and unpredictable was the “double hater” — the voter who disliked both major presidential contenders. Around 15% of voters fell into that category at the time.
Today, just 6% of voters nationally say they feel that way. But among uncommitted voters, the dual antipathy remains higher, with 30% saying they dislike both Trump and Harris.
Sammie Gay, a 40-year-old father of three from Lee County, Alabama, said he voted for Biden in 2020 but feels alienated from both major political parties.
Gay said that Democrats seemed to have forgotten about Black families like his, while directing more attention toward other marginalized groups, like immigrants and LGBTQ+ people.
“The Democratic Party as a whole seems to be against everything family,” he said. “Anything masculine, they seem to dislike that. They want to take that down.”
On the other hand, Republicans, Gay said, can seem downright hostile to Black people.
“Republicans want to push their Christian values while taking away Black Studies in school,” he said. “I just don’t feel like they’re concerned with my well-being in America.
“I’m not represented on either side,” he concluded. He said he would probably support Jill Stein, the Green Party candidate, in November.
Dawson Harris, a self-employed 26-year-old from Oakland County, Michigan, said he, too, did not trust either candidate.
“I feel like I’m going to lose either way, to be honest,” he said. His choice will be, he said, “the lesser of two evils.”
The vice president’s economic plans seemed to him to be pandering, while Trump’s could hurt the middle class, especially tariffs on foreign goods from countries like China.
“It sounds great: ‘We’re going to punish them,’” Harris said. “But it all comes back around on us.”
Harris said he would rather vote for a third party to register his disapproval with two-party rule. But since he lives in Michigan — a swing state that voted for Trump in 2016 and Biden in 2020 — and believes strongly in maintaining Second Amendment protections for gun ownership, he reluctantly plans to vote for Trump.
Villarouel, the Kennesaw State senior, said that this was the first presidential election he had followed closely. In 2020, when he was 18, he said, “I was kind of under a rock.”
In some ways, he said, he wished he could still be that blissfully unaware. “I kind of try to put off thinking about the election, even though November is coming up,” he said. “Damn, this is scary.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
© 2024 The New York Times Company
