Here's What's Going On In The Mind Of The Still-Undecided Voter (2024)

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Americans who haven’t decided who they’ll support in this year’s presidential election may make up a small fraction of the voting public.

A NPR/PBS News/Marist poll in August found that just 2% of voters nationally were undecided. A survey last month conducted by researchers at Franklin & Marshall College looking at the swing state of Pennsylvania showed that only 3% of voters there were undecided.

In a race this close, even a few percentage points could make a difference, just as they did in 2016 and 2020.

But as Nov. 4 fast approaches, committed voters might wonder: How could anyone still be undecided?

To get to the bottom of that question, we asked social psychologists and experts on voting behavior and decision-making to speculate on what might be going on in the mind of the still-indecisive voter. Here’s what they had to say.

They may be leaning one way without realizing (or without telling the pollster).

Pollsters take a straightforward approach to measuring human behavior: to find out what someone will do, ask them.

But people don’t always know what they are going to do ahead of time or realize they’re leaning one way or another, said Sam Wang, a professor of neuroscience at Princeton University.

“For instance, I don’t know what I’ll have for lunch next Tuesday, but if someone observed my habits over a period of weeks, they might be able to make a pretty good guess as to [which] I will end up choosing when presented with a sandwich or sushi,” he said.

In other words, even if someone believes themself to be undecided, they may be committed to a decision before they become aware of it explicitly, Wang said.

“This is why pollsters ask how people are leaning, but that is still counting on people’s ability to state an opinion,” he told HuffPost.

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They’re not necessarily uninformed. They might just require more time than the average voter to make a decision.

As Wang explained in a 2008 New York Times op-ed he co-wrote with fellow neuroscientist Joshua Gold, research in psychology suggests that most undecided voters may be smarter than you think.

“They’re not indifferent or unable to make clear comparisons between the candidates,” the pair wrote. “They may be more willing than others to take their time or else just unaware that they have essentially already made a choice.”

Most people, after they’ve gathered enough evidence to reach a decision threshold, ignore further input, even when it might improve their decision-making processes, the scientists explained. For the committed among us, “the brain goes ahead and decides, freeing up mental resources to deal with other problems,” they wrote.

They may be conservatives or moderates who feel uncomfortable with their party’s candidate this time around.

Brianna N. Mack, an assistant professor of politics and government at Ohio Wesleyan University in Delaware, Ohio, thinks “undecided voter” may be a bit of a misnomer, at least in elections where Trump has been on the ballot.

“Instead, there are folks who lean conservative or folks who lean moderate who, in light of the extremely polarized environment that we’re currently in, think it’s better to actually hide or identify as undecided, as opposed to picking a side,” she said.

Yanna Krupnikov, a professor of communication and media at the University of Michigan and the author of “The Other Divide: Polarization and Disengagement in American Politics,” thinks there are voters who are truly undecided, but it’s a unique kind of indecision.

“Their indecision is different than selecting between two options which appear like they could be equally good. Rather, it is an indecision about which discomfort you are most willing to deal with,” she said.

Such a voter may be debating with themself about whether they can hold their nose and vote for one of the candidates, Krupnikov said. In those cases, the question may not be who they’ll vote for, but whether they’ll vote at all.

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They may not think the candidates are all that different.

Many voters feel there are clear differences between the two candidates on hot-button policy topics, including reproductive rights, immigration, tax cuts, climate change, inflation and the economy.

But some voters may not see meaningful differences between Harris and Trump, said Simone Tang, a professor of organizational behavior who studies behavioral economics and decision-making at Cornell University.

“I thought it was interesting that Pope Francis argued that neither candidate was pro-life recently,” she told HuffPost. “In cases like that, how do you choose between two things that appear similar to you? That is difficult.”

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They may feel that their vote doesn’t matter because they think the outcome is predetermined anyway.

What Tang has found in her research is that the more important and the more difficult a decision is, the more people believe that fate will guide their choice.

“To the extent they believe that the outcome is fated or predetermined, they may be more detached or less willing to make a commitment,” she explained. “The election is conducive to a belief in fate, because not only is it a weighty and important decision, [it’s] an event in which one’s vote is one among millions.”

When something feels stressful or overwhelming ― like a neck-and-neck presidential race ― people are more likely to believe that the part they can play is limited, she said.

“Such a voter may be less willing to engage in the task or less willing to make a definitive decision because the outcome is predetermined anyway,” Tang explained.

They may be holding out for a candidate to speak to an issue they have a very clear position on.

Krupnikov said she’s noticed that undecided voters are either seen as the “best” voters, because they’re taking their time and thinking through things, or the “worst” voters, because they cannot make a decision when faced with two very different options. (The latter take is why indecisive voters are reliable punching bags for late night television hosts.)

But the label “undecided” includes people who may actually have very clear positions on certain issues but who struggle to find a candidate whose views match up with those preferences, Krupnikov said.

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There may be more undecided voters than we realize.

Tony Greenwald, a professor emeritus of psychology at the University of Washington whose research looks at how implicit bias shapes social behavior, thinks polls may actually underestimate the number of undecided voters out there.

“Many undecided voters probably decline to respond to polls, and pollsters are often secretive about the methods they use to deal with the sampling biases that cannot be avoided in their methods of recruiting participants,” he said.

Though the number of undecided voters will no doubt dwindle by the time Nov. 4 rolls around, a number of studies and surveys on election behavior suggest that some voters remain undecided right up to Election Day, according to Malte Friese, a social psychologist who studies voting behavior and teaches at Saarland University in Germany.

Still, Friese, like other experts we spoke to, thinks that most indecisive voters are leaning some way, whether they admit it to themselves or not.

“My suspicion is that the number of undecideds would shrink considerably if [pollsters inquired] a little bit more insistently about their voting intentions,” he said.