Last week, I shamelessly eavesdropped on a couple of women eating breakfast where I was enjoying my avocado poached egg plate. It was the day of the Big Debate—hours before Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump would face each other in what became the most watched presidential debate in history. Toward the end of their meal, one of the women announced she was going to skip the debate to watch ESPN’s Monday Night Football. When her friend expressed surprise, the first woman replied, “Hasn’t everybody made up their minds by now?”
And that, ladies and gentlemen, is what my mother would have described as the $64,000 question. Hasn’t everybody made up their minds, indeed? As much as I was appalled that this clearly intelligent woman was planning to shirk a civic duty, I realized that I agreed with her bottom-line assessment. Most people who intend to vote have made up their minds.
CNBC senior columnist Jake Novak noted that self-declared undecideds made up 11 percent of voters before the debate—that number calculated by averaging several polls. This represents a 37 percent increase over this same time in the 2012 election cycle. It’s why he was suspicious, as I am, that there were really undecided voters. In an op-ed for Yahoo Finance, Novak speculates that a lot of voters were using the debates “as a fake excuse” to “justify a decision they made weeks or months before based on reasons that also may be a little embarrassing to admit.”
Novak points out in a campaign where both candidates are as unpopular as Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton, the debates will not change the minds of the already-decided undecided, but it will help closeted voters “feel better about making their opinion public.”
No doubt the reason the scant few real undecideds haven’t made up their minds yet is because they haven’t been paying attention until now. If the 86 million who tuned in last week are any indication, that’s all changed. The debate easily beat out a football game—ESPN drew the lowest viewership in its 25 years of record keeping. But the experts say that a lot of the debate listeners and watchers were not truly open to considering each of the candidates’ positions. They were instead, already committed and looking to affirm that commitment, even if reluctant to say so. And, I’d add excited to watch an event hyped as the Super Bowl of politics 2016.
What’s more, evidence shows there’s little chance that true political partisans can actually be influenced. Multiple studies have confirmed that even when there are definitive facts, many refuse to accept what they believe is not true.
I care about all this because, as the old country saying goes, I have a dog in this fight. Selfishly, I’d been holding out hope that the mythical legions of undecideds would help carry my candidate over the finish line. Maybe that’s why I don’t have much empathy for the faux undecideds. Or for the voters who will not pay attention to the debates. There is too much at stake for an uninformed and unengaged electorate to choose the next leader of the free world.
