Really? Are there really undecided voters left?
Yes, as hard as it may be for most of us to believe, after putting up with the ads and soundbites of the presidential race for more than a year, polls show almost 10 percent of voters still haven’t made up their minds.
That’s typical. I used to make fun of such voters. I thought they were pathologically indecisive, like people in a supermarket checkout line who go into paralysis when asked to choose paper or plastic.
But give them some respect. With national polls and some crucial battleground states tightening, the holdouts deserve new respect. There are more than enough of them to decide whether experienced Democrat Hillary Clinton or entertaining Republican Donald Trump will be our next president.
To get more insight into their frame of mind, I spent Friday evening with a roomful of undecided voters on the other side of a one-way mirror from me and about a dozen other journalists.
Republican pollster Frank Luntz, a superstar convener of focus groups, organized the three-hour session for AARP in Alexandria, a pearl on the Potomac River in the important battleground state of Virginia.
The group consisted of 30 people, including 11 women, a range of age brackets and a sprinkling of black, Hispanic and Asian-Americans. Ten said they voted for President Barack Obama twice, 15 voted against him twice, four said they had voted for him once. (The last was a first-time voter.)
One of the black men said he voted for Republican Sen. John McCain in 2008. That surprised me for a moment. Blacks who voted against Obama even once — and admit it — are almost as rare as unicorns. But getting past our stereotypes to find out how voters really feel is why we turn to focus groups.
This group of voters was fed up, and they let us know it. They didn’t like either major party’s nominee.
When Luntz asked for one-word descriptions of Clinton, participants called out responses like “deceitful,” “slimy,” “liar,” “untrustworthy” and “corruption.” Trump was described as “crazy,” “unstable,” “unbalanced,” “arrogant,” “a bigot,” a “buffoon” and “megalomaniac.”
A few said without enthusiasm that they might consider an alternative party’s candidate, such as Libertarian Gary Johnson or the Green Party’s Jill Stein, although neither was catching fire with this group.
The group was shown an array of attack ads and feel-good spots for both candidates and asked to rate each one, moment-to-moment with hand-held dials.
They liked an ad in which Clinton promised to work with Republicans. But they also liked an anti-Clinton ad that featured a retired naval officer challenging Clinton about her emails and national security asked during NBC’s recent “Commander-in-Chief Forum.”
“It’s on the spot,” one participant said. “It’s not staged. There’s no performance.”
At one point near the end, Luntz left the room briefly to talk to the journos in the observation room. “We have now reached the point,” he said, “when even the standard soundbites do not work.”
They’ve heard it all before, over and over again, Luntz said. Most of the group was disturbed by Trump’s negative ads and actions, such as his criticism of the Muslim parents of a U.S. Army soldier killed in Iraq. They were no less troubled by Clinton’s use of a private email server when she was secretary of state.
The ad with the naval officer connected because it featured a real person earnestly asking a real question, instead of a professional announcer. As the late comedian George Burns used to say, the secret to success in life is sincerity: “If you can fake that, you’ve got it made.”
Undecided voters, as evidenced by Luntz’s group, are turned off by the fakery, attack ads and attack soundbites. They’re looking for solutions. Trump’s ads offered more diagnoses than prescriptions. Clinton offered proposals but without a unifying or inspiring theme. For both, positive messages were more welcome than negative ones — but also more rare.
Luntz suggested the election may well come down to who Americans would rather wake up to as their next president on the morning after Election Day. If so, I think Clinton’s best hope may be that undecided voters choose the flawed candidate they know over the flawed newcomer they don’t.
Clarence Page, a member of the Tribune Editorial Board, blogs at www.chicagotribune.com/pagespage.
Twitter @cptime
