What are political conventions really for? Once the base is fired up and falls in line, the nominees have a singular goal: Appeal to the undecided voters who might just swing the election, with carefully crafted messages aimed at “soccer moms” or “NASCAR dads” or whatever middle-of-the-road group seems to be in play that year.
Here’s the problem with that: Even experts don’t really understand who undecided voters actually are. And we have no idea what they really want. And they probably aren’t all that moderate after all.
“If you think there’s a ‘good’ to saying, ‘I want to hear both sides,’ you might say you’re undecided. You might actually even on some level believe you’re undecided. But you’re probably not,” says Yanna Krupnikov, a political scientist at Stony Brook University. For more than a decade, she has been studying the political psychology of voters and nonvoters alike, and what she’s found is that “undecided voters” aren’t really independent, or moderate. In fact, they’re often more partisan than some voters who openly identify with a party.
And when it comes to the handful of “pure” independents — those voters who legitimately do not lean toward one major party or the other, and could perhaps be swayed ... well, they’re probably not watching these conventions at all, “except maybe by accident,” she says.
“They are just generally less interested in politics and often know less about it” than other groups, Krupnikov said.
For parties, it’s a challenge: If they’re really trying to woo new voters, what do those people really need to hear, and what do they want from a leader? And for the country overall, it could actually do some harm, she says, by focusing even more attention on people who already have a lot of clout in the system. “If we think about coverage and elections as giving people voice, if we decide that this is the group of the moment, we’re implicitly deciding that other voices are not as important at this particular time,” says Krupnikov, who earlier this year advised the Knight Foundation on its authoritative study of American nonvoters. “The question we need to ask is, whose voices have we now essentially excluded? It often happens that the group that gets elevated could be a group whose voice is often elevated, which then factors into what we think is the important political agenda.”
In the midst of one of the most divisive political moments in modern history, what does it mean to be undecided? Do we leave nonvoters out of that definition? And can we realistically expect the national conventions to make any difference to people uncertain whether or not they’ll participate this year? To sort through all of this, Krupnikov spoke with POLITICO this week. A transcript of the conversation is below, condensed and edited for length and clarity.
Zack Stanton: At this point in time, with such a major election and a very clear divide between the candidates, what kind of person would even be undecided right now?
Yanna Krupnikov: Everything we know about voters — not just undecided voters, but any voters — comes from what they’re willing to tell us in surveys. There are people who tell us they’re “undecided” because they feel like they should be. There are people who say they’re “independent” because there’s something good about saying you are above the fray and not partisan. If you think there’s a “good” to saying, “I want to hear both sides,” you might say you’re undecided. You might actually even on some level believe you’re undecided. But you’re probably not. You may call yourself “independent” even though you’ve literally never voted for the other party your whole life. There’s probably no chance you’re going to vote for the other party, but you say you’re undecided.
[In surveys,] we count on people to be truthful and introspective about their approach to the election, and that becomes especially difficult when we get to people who say they’re undecided and are genuinely uncertain, because they’re probably not going to vote in this election, they did not vote in the last election, and they’re not going to vote in the next election. They are basically disassociated from politics — they feel like it’s not for them. They’re probably not going to watch the convention — either one — except maybe by accident.
Stanton: That feels like an important point: that “undecided” group includes people who are uncertain if they’ll vote for Trump or Biden, but also people genuinely unsure whether or not they will vote, period. What differentiates the undecideds who vote from those who don’t?
Krupnikov: In the midterm elections, one of the biggest differences was that there’s a group of undecided people who genuinely believe that voting is important: I’m going to turn out in this election, so I’ve got to figure out who I'm going to vote for. There is some perception that showing up to vote might matter — not in the sense of “I am the pivotal vote,” but more as a democratic good.
For people uncertain if they’re going to vote at all, there’s less of that. There’s less interest in being part of the process — not because these are bad people or don’t understand how important things are, but because they genuinely feel unrepresented and have never seen politics do anything for them. They don’t necessarily believe there’s a value to voting.
Stanton: If they don’t see politics as including people like them, then if politics is increasingly defined by partisanship — which is especially the case during the conventions — do those potential voters just stay away completely because they don’t see a way to engage in politics without being partisan?
Krupnikov: Yeah. My coauthor and I are currently finishing up a book project on precisely this gap: the idea that the more we elevate hyperpartisan voices and the more that politics becomes extraordinarily partisan, the more we send the message to people that how you participate in the political process is by being very vocal and harboring animosity toward the other side. You might actually see yourself agreeing with one side, but you might feel disaffected if you believe that in order to be involved in politics, you need to be constantly angry and constantly proclaiming your side versus the other.
Stanton: Among self-identified independents, as you noted, some people call themselves independents but actually always vote for a certain party, and others are actually swing voters. How does that break down?
Krupnikov: Oh, man. So, everything we know about independents is heavily related to how we’ve been asking the “partisanship” question. The way most surveys ask the partisanship question is in two steps. First: “Do you identify as Republican, Democrat or independent?” Second, everyone who says they’re independent is asked a follow-up question: “Do you lean toward the Democratic Party or the Republican Party?” Political scientists affectionately call those who lean towards Democrats or Republicans “leaners.” And then we have people who did not give a leaning; those are “pure independents.”
Over time, we have seen a much higher proportion of independents who do lean than don’t. But most recently, the proportion who don’t lean at all — the “pure independents” — has been increasing. But it’s not that high — at its highest, I think it was something like 20 percent of independents. And there is a really interesting difference here: The people who initially say they’re independents but actually lean toward one party behave very much like partisans. In fact, by some measures, they’re actually more partisan than the respondents who initially identified with a party and later said they’re “weak” partisans. I was just looking at data we recently got back, and the “leaner” independents had slightly more animus toward the opposing party than people who initially identified with a party but are weak partisans. They behave like partisans, except they won’t say that they are partisans to begin with.
Why won’t they just tell us their party? I think they’re doing a couple of things. One, at a particular moment, they’re probably very displeased with what their preferred party is doing — something happened, and they want to disassociate themselves from that. It could be contextual to political moment, or it could be something that happens over time: I’m a Republican, I don’t like a direction the party is heading. I’m going to slowly start moving.
The problem is, of course, is that this “leaner” group encompasses tremendous political diversity. If I am a Democrat or Republican and don’t think my party is extreme enough, I might say I “lean.” If I am a Democrat or Republican, but think my party is too extreme, I'm also going to “lean."
What has been sort of unusual about American politics is that we’re seeing this increase in affective polarization, this increase in partisan identities, but also, suddenly, this increase in people saying they’re independent. Who are these independents who don’t lean toward a party? We actually recently looked at the data. And there are a couple of patterns about them.
First, they are actually quite unhappy, not just with politics, but with life. They’re disaffected not just from politics, but from the general community. How satisfied you are with your life ends up being a predictor of whether you identify as an independent who doesn’t lean towards a party. Second, they can be dissatisfied with all the candidates. But that’s a hard one to understand using 2016 data, when you had two of the most unpopular candidates in history: Was that a 2016 situation, or was that just their general predisposition?
The other thing we know about people who identify as pure independents is that they are just generally less interested in politics and often know less about it. Back in the 1960s, when one of the first comprehensive surveys of American politics came out, the American National Election Study, that was one of the surprises: There had been this normative ideal of this person who is “independent” and above the fray — that they’re really going to think about the candidates and the parties. And they discovered that these people knew much less than the partisans, were much less engaged than the partisans, much less interested than the partisans.
Stanton: One of the traps that I think we in the media often fall into is that we treat “undecided” as synonymous with “moderate.” And it sounds like you’re saying is that is a false assumption to make.
Krupnikov: Yes.
Stanton: What’s a better way to think of it?
Krupnikov: The way that I would think about “undecideds” — and this probably doesn’t make for good copy — is simply as people who, on a survey, opted to select the “undecided” box. Some of them might actually be moderate. Some might honestly be more extreme than the partisans who told you straight-up who they were going to vote for. Some have probably never thought about where they are, politically. Some probably wish everyone stopped talking to them about politics. And some might never vote. But by virtue of all of them selecting the same box in a survey, we group together a lot of people who, in other political contexts, would never actually be grouped together.
Stanton: There is an idea that has found purchase in the last couple of years among certain political scientists — the idea that there aren’t swing voters in any meaningful sense, and that what really matters is just turning out the base. What do you make of that?
Krupnikov: I thought you were going to ask me about that. [Laughs] Let’s talk about definitionally, who “swing voters” are, because sometimes there’s a conflation of three groups: undecideds, independents and swing voters. But these have three really different definitions, right? Somebody is undecided just because they tell you that they don’t know who they’re going to vote for. Somebody who’s independent tells you they’re independent, but might vote for the same party in election after election. And somebody who’s a swing voter we can count on to go back and forth.
In a fundamental way, it is difficult to say that swing voters are a “myth,” because we see people who vote for different parties between elections. For something to be a myth, we would have to never see that. But we do! There’s an important distinction to be made between saying that something doesn’t exist and saying that someone is unlikely to behave in a certain way.
We know from political science research that there is stability to partisan identity, and that over time, people retain partisan identities. People are unlikely to switch parties, but that doesn’t mean that they won’t. It could also be within somebody’s behavior to vote for a candidate of a different party without saying they’re switching their partisan behavior. For example, you could vote for somebody of a different party, but say, “I'm still a Republican, but in this particular context …"
Now, I suppose we could argue that swing voters are people who we consistently, election from election, go back and forth. If that’s what we mean, the group probably diminishes further. But again, saying that something is unlikely to happen is not the same thing as saying that something will never happen. Politics is uncertain, and the contexts around politics are uncertain. Two years ago, we probably would never have predicted that the 2020 election would take place during a pandemic.
Stanton: In past elections, there has been a tendency to talk about swing voters as neatly fitting into an archetype, like “soccer moms” in 1996 or “NASCAR dads” in 2004. Is that a useful way at all to think about the electorate?
Krupnikov: Speaking normatively, I'm not sure that this is the most helpful way to think about the electorate. In part, it reduces politics to the group of the moment, when if we look over the political spectrum on a daily basis, we’re dealing with a tremendous set of social ills that are fighting for attention. To reduce something to one group implicitly makes the choice of what we think is important in the grand political scheme, which I don’t necessarily think is helpful.
Once we’ve decided that “soccer moms” or “NASCAR dads” are the thing that is important this election, these groups receive a tremendous amount of coverage, which has a fairly tremendous agenda-setting power as to whose voices are really important. So if we think about coverage and elections as giving people voice, if we decide that this is the group of the moment, we’re implicitly deciding that other voices are not as important at this particular time. The question we need to ask is, whose voices have we now essentially excluded? And I think it often happens that the group that gets elevated could be a group whose voice is often elevated, which then factors into what we think is the important political agenda.
So I don’t think that looking for these very particular groups and then kind of working backwards to search out people who represent that particular group is the best way to go from that perspective.
Stanton: There’s a lot of energy expended every election cycle trying to understand undecided voters and swing voters, but not as much about understanding nonvoters. You’ve done quite a bit of work on this. Who are the nonvoters at this moment?
Krupnikov: They’re another huge group of very different people! Again, by virtue of the way surveys are constructed, we often put together people with very diverse and often conflicting interests. Sometimes, we can think about nonvoters as occasional nonvoters — people who usually vote, but a lot of things happen. And then we’re talking also about habitual nonvoters — people who routinely, election after election, do not vote.
A lot of the time, candidates aren’t necessarily trying to reach out to habitual nonvoters, because there’s an assumption that you can’t count on them to turn out to vote, so why put in the time trying to reach them? On some level, habitual nonvoters aren’t getting the boost they need to try to vote.
Social networks are key to voting. If you’re living with a voter, they’re going to tell you to vote. If you are friends with people who are voters, they’re going to tell you to vote. That’s going to help you turn out. But if everyone around you is a nonvoter, you’re probably not going to turn out. So that’s one factor.
Another factor with nonvoters is that they can be people who are overburdened in their lives. There’s research to suggest that after people have their first child, while the child is small, the new parents are unlikely to vote — there’s so much happening, you’re barely making it through the day, and showing up to stand in line to vote is beyond anything you can do. And it’s not just new parents. Think about people who have hourly jobs and who have children, and who don’t necessarily have support networks to help with that. It’s hard to ask them to give up time of their day to turn out and vote.
After that, you also have people who are disaffected from their communities. There’s evidence, for example, suggesting that after people move, they’re less likely to vote, because they lack support systems, lack integration to their communities, and you have a lot of this disaffection from politics if you feel entirely unrepresented. Why would you spend the time to vote if you don’t think anyone is going to make your life better?
Then we get into another group: People who genuinely don’t care. And I think in some sense, this is the hardest group to study, because we can send people surveys — and by virtue of them responding to a survey, they will definitively tell you something. But that’s not the case if they just don’t care. For these people, politics is just something that is unimportant. They do not necessarily see it as pivotal to their lives.
Stanton: Do we know the size of that group of people who just don’t care? It’s appealing to identify as an “independent,” and I imagine there’s probably some stigma associated with saying “I don’t care.”
Krupnikov: Yeah. It’s also not really an option on a lot of surveys: “I feel strongly about this,” “I strongly disagree” or “I do not care.” Some surveys give the option “I don’t know” or “no opinion,” but we get into a really odd situation there, because that “no opinion” option is going to hide people who are genuinely giving you no opinion by combining them with people who actually have a very strong opinion but are ashamed by what their opinion is. And in a lot of cases, we contact people, they think about an issue for the first time, and we think, “Oh, this person has an opinion.” It’s sometimes difficult in a survey to distinguish people who have a profoundly strong opinion about something from those who are literally thinking about this issue for the very first time.
Stanton: Final question: Looking at the Democratic National Convention this week and the Republican convention next week, is any of what we see at these conventions likely to matter to a nonvoter?
Krupnikov: [Long pause] Well, OK. This, to me, would be the best-case scenario for these conventions: A habitual nonvoter happens to be embedded in a network with somebody who is a less habitual nonvoter and happens to come across something that happened during the convention that gets them extraordinarily excited, and they then convince that habitual nonvoter to vote.
However, the thing that I would suggest here is that the campaign season is incredibly long, and if something exciting happens at the convention that leads somebody to want to vote, they’re going to have to sustain that enthusiasm for what, two months? And sustaining a behavioral intention for two months is really difficult. Even if somebody manages to have a moment at this convention that leads them to say, “I’m really excited, and I’m going to vote,” that excitement is going to have to carry them to November. And a lot of things can happen by then.
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