Here we go again. The latest missive about the "undecided" voter is a debate on the impact of Obama's early television ads that painted Romney as an elite, vulture capitalist with overseas bank accounts and no real understanding of the plight of the middle class.
Want to know what the "undecided" voter thinks? Here's the real skinny from David Sedaris right before the 2008 election:
To put them [undecided voters] in perspective, I think of being on an airplane. The flight attendant comes down the aisle with her food cart and, eventually, parks it beside my seat. “Can I interest you in the chicken?” she asks. “Or would you prefer the platter of shit with bits of broken glass in it?” To be undecided in this election is to pause for a moment and then ask how the chicken is cooked.
But the undecided, or swing, or independent voter has caught the attention of the pundits so now it's all the rage. There's only one problem. It's so much bullcrap. Read below the fold.
First we take a look at the way voters identified themselves. According to Gallup on October 26, 2012, Democrats were 35%, Republicans were 36% and Independents were 29%. If this is true, it means that the independent vote broke almost 60% for Obama. Could so many people have been unable to tell the difference between chicken and a platter of shit two weeks before the end of the campaign? A comparison between voter registrations and final Presidentials tallies doesn't bear this out.
When the dust finally settled and the smoke cleared, there were only four states in which the popular vote went for Romney even though a majority of the registered voters were Democrats: Kentucky, Louisiana, North Carolina and West Virginia. It's difficult to believe that party registrations in states as red as Kentucky, Louisiana and West Virginia meant that voters who went for Romney were truly "independent" or "undecided." They don't call themselves Republicans because they haven't bothered to re-register. But they've been eating shit for a long time and they don't need a minute to figure out if they might prefer the chicken.