What Do We Do About the Undecided Vote?

So, with 6 weeks to go until la-la land, how do you run as a GOP candidate and avoid talking about Trump? Because it’s clear to me that what GOP candidates in swing districts have to do is move those 4–5% of the voters who could go either way to go for them. And to do that without being attacked by the blue team as just another supporter of MAGA, is what these GOP candidates need to do or neither the House nor the Senate will flip red.

Right now, according to Real Clear Politics, there are roughly 9% of the voters who haven’t yet decided how they are going to vote. This percentage of undecided votes has been constant since RCP started tracking the ‘generic’ Congressional vote back in May 2021. The gap between red and blue has ever been more than 4 or 5 points; as of yesterday, the polls are in a tie. But the 10 percent who can’t make up their minds hasn’t budged one bit.

Which is a good context to remind everyone again about the single, best piece of political satire ever published by anyone at all, which is the essay about undecided voters written by David Sedaris during the 2008 campaign. Here’s what he says:

“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.

I mean, really, what’s to be confused about?”

Now obviously, in this year’s election, any candidate who says that he or she is running to ‘take America back’ and give it to Donald Trump is a platter of shit with broke glass. But how does someone run as a GOP candidate and convince voters that he or she represents the way they like their chicken cooked?

It turns out that the Senate Numero Uno for the blue team, Chuck Schumer, has an opponent named Joe Pinion, a former Newsmax spieler, who is right now 21 points behind in the RCP polls, but the undecided vote is still above 10 percent. Back in May, he gave an interview to Breitbart where he laid out a ‘detailed’ agenda for making the race competitive, the headline being to “change the trajectory of America politics” from what it now…