The 5 percent: Biden and Trump chase shrinking pool of undecided voters
In 2016, Naresh Vissa thought Hillary Clinton was knowledgeable and liked the idea of electing the first female president, but was also attracted to Donald Trump’s anti-establishment approach. Torn between the two nominees, he sat out the election altogether.
“I didn’t see a need to go out and vote because I was ok with either of the candidates,” Vissa recalled, after casting a ballot for Mitt Romney in 2012 and Barack Obama in 2008.
Vissa is similarly unsure of what he’ll do this November. He’s not certain the president deserves a second term, but holds real concerns about Joe Biden’s mental acuity. Once again, he may choose not to vote at all.
Count Vissa, a 31-year-old Indian-American digital marketing entrepreneur in Tampa, Fla., as part of a pivotal and shrinking voting bloc: the undecideds.
Biden and Trump campaign officials estimate this crop of swing voters only makes up somewhere around 5 percent of the total electorate in 2020, a considerably smaller available slice than in the last election. One pre-election panel found as many as 21 percent of voters were undecided in late October 2016. Recent national surveys from Fox News and The Economist found just 5 percent of voters said they didn’t know who they would choose in the presidential race.
Both campaigns have already identified most of the voters in this small universe and are heavily targeting them with ads, knowing they could determine the outcome in the handful of battleground states that are typically won by the narrowest of margins.
“They don’t go to the rallies, they don’t watch the briefings. They tend to get their news through reports and they’re not really focused on Biden,” John McLaughlin, one of Trump’s pollsters, said of this year’s undecided voters. “A lot of them haven’t heard many negative things about Joe Biden. They only hear negative stuff about Trump from the media.”
Pollsters agree that truly undecided voters are a dwindling group, the result of accelerated polarization in the Trump era where even a national pandemic ends up breaking down by partisan tribe. And they surmise that even some who claim to be undecided are actually leaning in one direction or the other, making the bloc even smaller.
The potential voters who sit on the fence in 2020 tend to be younger than 50, college-educated and in the middle to upper-middle class income bracket. They’re not all necessarily uninformed or even disengaged — Vissa himself has personally logged the disparity in references to Trump and Biden during CNN programming— but they are generally skeptical of politicians and often the media. And while they hold disparate personal ideological leanings, they maintain their independence by repelling from major party labels.
The Trump campaign believes a certain percentage of Biden’s core support — currently averaging at 48 percent— is soft and ultimately movable more than five months out from the election. The Trump ad blitz that commenced earlier this month highlighting Biden’s verbal gaffes and portraying the former vice president as a pawn of China is designed to plant seeds of doubt among the softest portions of Biden’s base.
“They also know which of their voters are soft and we’re coming after them,” said McLaughlin. “We haven’t laid a glove on them yet. But that’s going to change.”
Part of this outreach involves a targeted project in which the Republican National Committee, in conjunction with the Trump campaign, keeps close tabs on around 20,000 swing voters in each key state, using local organizing teams to facilitate communication that ironically mirrors the strategy of President Barack Obama’s reelection campaign.
But Biden’s numbers have been largely resilient in the face of Trump’s attacks. The former vice president’s advisers believe that is a testament to Biden being a known quantity that Trump will struggle to redefine.The presumptive Democratic nominee’s campaign is targeting some of its digital advertising, like a spot portraying Trump as a deer in headlights in the early weeks of the coronavirus outbreak, to persuadable voters in battleground states.
Biden’s campaign is also betting that its recently formed issue task forces — constructed as an olive branch to progressives who supported Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren in the Democratic primary — will reduce defections and abstentions from liberals and younger people less enthusiastic about Biden. Surveys of some of the most disaffected voters are already showing a preference for Biden.
Additionally, the lack of major third-party candidates this year may serve to underline a stark binary choice.
“There are fewer undecided voters and there’s more energy this election because Americans have seen how badly Trump has mismanaged the coronavirus, and how it’s affected them, and they know the stakes couldn’t be any higher,” said Biden spokesman Mike Gwin.
Some prominent Democrats, like pollster Cornell Belcher, have publicly argued that attempting to convert Trump supporters is a waste of time. Biden himself acknowledged last month he was unlikely to reach the president’s base. It could mean that this presidential election becomes more driven by base-motivating messages than appeals packaged to convert.
But Trump’s support in public polls this year has consistently lagged from his 2016 total by about 3 percentage points, an indication that the softest part of his coalition is gravitating to Biden.
Still, the most fluid voters characteristically remain volatile until the bitter end, susceptible to late breaking events and candidate mishaps. Trump, after all, pulled off his surprise win in 2016 by capturing double-digit margins among voters who decided in the last week of the campaign in Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Florida.
“It’s May and the only thing that matters right now is how much Donald Trump is screwing up,” said Jef Pollock, a Democratic pollster whose firm is conducting surveys for the pro-Biden super PAC Priorities USA. “In general, these are the voters that shift around at the close.”
It’s far too early to decide for Vissa, who said he’s been targeted on Twitter and Instagram by Trump campaign advertising, but not yet by Biden. “We’re talking in May,” he said. “I may not vote again. If you come back in October, I’ll be able to give you a more precise answer.”
This story was originally published May 27, 2020 at 11:45 AM with the headline "The 5 percent: Biden and Trump chase shrinking pool of undecided voters."
