I have a confession to make. At this point in the 2012 election cycle I was an undecided voter in the presidential election. I wasn’t the type of undecided voter that the media really likes to focus on though. That’s because I wasn’t undecided between Barack Obama and Mitt Romney. I was considering between Barack Obama and Green Party candidate Jill Stein. There was no chance in hell that I would ever cast a ballot for Mitt Romney and yet if a pollster called me I’d like be classified as undecided. In the end, I made up my mind in the voting booth and went with Obama.
What does that have to do with this election? For one, the polling is indicating that third parties are going to enjoy the highest level of support since Ross Perot was last on the ballot in 1996. In four-way national polling averages Gary Johnson and Jill Stein combined appear to be taking about 8 to 9% of the popular vote. Another 6 or 7 percent are uncommitted to a candidate. This introduces far more uncertainty into election forecasting about who will win and by how much.
That got me thinking: how many voters right now find themselves in a position like mine in 2012. How many of the nation’s undecided voters have already decided against either Clinton or Trump and are instead considering Johnson, Stein, or McMullin? That is a question I haven’t found a good answer to and it is a very interesting one to consider. Pollsters have approached the question by asking third party supporters to make a hypothetical decision between Clinton and Trump. You can also get a sense of where undecideds may be leaning by looking at the major candidates’ favorability ratings but both approaches don’t quite answer it.
Here’s the critical question I’d like pollsters to ask undecideds:
“How likely are you to vote for [candidate]? Very unlikely, somewhat unlikely, somewhat likely, or very likely?”
This information could give us a far better indication of Clinton and Trump’s potential upside and how that vote is going to break as third parties predictably fade down the stretch. If for example 60% of undecideds say that there’s not a chance in hell that they’ll ever vote for Trump, you have a much better idea of what his ceiling will be and how much upside Clinton has. It also a direct challenge to the beltway assumption that most of the nation’s undecided voters are low-information voters stuck deciding between a Republican and a Democrat. When both Clinton and Trump are two of the most disliked presidential candidates in recent history, it seems very plausible that uncommitted voters are considering other alternatives.
If anyone in has information that answers this question from public polling I would be very interested in seeing it. I fully admit that I haven’t researched everything there is to research on this question but it was a matter I haven’t seen discussed all that much this cycle.
P.S. Because I know I’ll probably get this question in comments. I’m not undecided this year and I’m voting for HRC.