Undecided Voters Not Breaking for McCain

by: tremayne

Sat Nov 01, 2008 at 22:26

There has been some speculation or even "concern" that the group of people who remained undecided about the presidential race might skew toward John McCain. The theory was that most of the hesitant middle folks that would ever bring themselves to vote for "that one" had already made that decision, thereby leaving the remaining pool a group of mostly conservatives who may have been less than thrilled about McCain and/or Palin but who would "come home" in the end. Here's some evidence that may not be the case. First, the average of seven daily tracking polls shows Barack Obama gaining for the third straight day with 50.7 percent of the vote to 43.9 percent for McCain. Add those two numbers together and you'll get 94.6, the highest mark in any edition of the tracking poll average whether there were 4 or 5 or 6 or (now) 7 polls in the average. Look what's happened to the undecided/third party vote over the last 12 days:

During this same period the gap between Obama and McCain has been fairly stable at about 6.9 percent (today is 6.8 percent). The evidence so far suggests a fairly even split as undecided/other move to Obama or McCain.

The undecide-voters-are-conservatives theory was dubious to begin with but pushed hard by the Republican side since it was one of the few plausible stories they could tell that ended in victory. It was dubious because you would expect that someone as historically unique as Barack Obama would require, for some voters, a good deal of "getting used to" before they could tell a pollster "I'm voting for Amoeba, Osama, Obama!" Now you might think they had lots of time, too much time, for that but this type of voter is probably the opposite of many blog readers when it comes to attention to politics and so their decision comes at the very end.