The New Yorker:

We know that the fence-sitters in a few states will decide this election, but is there an obvious answer for how either candidate should try to appeal to them?

By Jay Caspian Kang

How does one start a story about the undecided voter in 2024? Every decided voter is alike; every undecided voter is undecided in his own way . . . We are talking now of summer evenings in Mechanicsburg, Pennsylvania, in the time that the undecided voter lived there so successfully disguised to himself as a Republican child . . .

For months, I have heard breathless talk about the undecided voter, gossipped and theorized about them with my friends, but I still have no idea how to commit them to the page as anything other than a largely undefined and mysterious entity: a percentage in the polls—somewhere between three per cent nationwide and up to fifteen per cent in swing states, depending on whichever pollster you trust—or respondents in the latest focus group. After debates, they are dragged in front of cameras to deliver sober assessments about how the night’s performances swayed their decision in one way or another. (The verdicts, more often than not, involve slight shifts in the way the voter is “leaning” and give off the image of the voter as a passive drunk swaying in the back of the bar while watching the action.) These testimonials, of course, are performances in themselves. Half of them feel like they’re being delivered by former theatre kids who have realized that being an undecided voter in Scranton will get them air time on CNN; the other half feel like they were recorded at some secret C.I.A. site in the coup-happy nineteen-eighties.

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