No One Wants To Admit The 2024 Undecided Voters Are All Nothing More Than Morons... Or Disinterested

Perlstein: “Undecided” is a way station between the final surrender to the Trumpian fantasy & sticking with the reality-based community

Yesterday, Charisma Madarang reported how Señor T “once again showed his disdain for United States military personnel during a campaign event in Milwaukee. When a reporter asked him if he believed he should have been “tougher on Iran” during his presidency “after they had launched ballistic missiles in 2020 on U.S. forces in Iraq,” which left “more than 100 U.S. soldiers injured,” Trump flipped out. Rather than discuss accountability, he “mocked U.S. troops. ‘What does injured mean?’ he retorted. ‘Injured means, you mean, because they had a headache? Because the bombs never hit the fort… There was nobody ever tougher on Iraq,’ Trump continued, confusing Iraq for Iran. ‘When you say not tough, they had no money. They had no money for Hamas. They had no money for Hezbollah. And when we hit them, they hit us. And they called us, and they said “We’re going to shoot at your fort but we’re not going to hit it.” The former president proceeded to insult the journalist, while downplaying the injuries sustained by troops. ‘If you were a truthful reporter, which you’re not, you would tell the following: None of those very accurate missiles hit our fort,’ he said. ‘They all hit outside, and there was nobody hurt other than the sound was loud and some people said that hurt, and I accept that.’” 

Although Trump was a Vietnam War draft dodger and probably wouldn’t care one whit about this, Charisma noted that “In 2020, the Defense Department confirmed that 109 U.S. service members were diagnosed with traumatic brain injuries after Iran attacked the Ain al-Asad airbase in Iraq. At the time, Trump appeared to dismiss the severity of the injuries and said, ‘I heard that they had headaches and a couple of other things, but I would say, and I can report, it is not very serious.’ Trump’s remarks on Tuesday follow his long history of insulting U.S. military.” 

This week, the increasingly senile and always cowardly Trump backed out of a 60 Minutes election special, after having agreed to participate, and thereby ceding the battlefield to Kamala. In a statement, CBS noted that “For over half a century, 60 Minutes has invited the Democratic and Republican tickets to appear on our broadcast as Americans head to the polls. This year, both the Harris and Trump campaigns agreed to sit down with 60 Minutes. Vice President Harris will speak with correspondent Bill Whitaker. After initially accepting 60 Minutes' request for an interview with Scott Pelley, former President Trump's campaign has decided not to participate. Pelley will address this Monday evening. Our election special will broadcast the Harris interview on Monday as planned. Our original invitation to former President Donald Trump to be interviewed on 60 Minutes stands.”

Think about those two reports when you contemplate the question historian Rick Perlstein raised: Who Are The Undecideds? I wonder if he toyed with the idea of placing “the fuck” between “who” and “are.” He brought a 2 decade-old Chris Hayes post for the New Republic, based on his canvassing undecided voters in Wisconsin. “Perhaps,” wrote Hayes, “the greatest myth about undecided voters is that they are undecided because of the ‘issues.’ That is, while they might favor Kerry on the economy, they favor Bush on terrorism; or while they are anti-gay marriage, they also support social welfare programs.”

Yesterday, Perlstein wrote that Hayes “noted that while there were a few people he talked to like that, ‘such cases were exceedingly rare. More often than not, when I asked undecided voters what issues they would pay attention to as they made up their minds I was met with a blank stare, as if I’d just asked them to name their favorite prime number… the very concept of the “issue” seemed to be almost completely alien to most of the undecided voters I spoke to.’ You would think others among the veritable armadas of mainstream journalists reporting out what undecided voters think would have met with such blank stares themselves. It is a testament to how bad framing narratives and rigid, ossified genre conventions distort perception so much that no mainstream journalist ever admits such a thing. Instead, they ram voters’ responses into their false frame, square-peg-in-round-hole style. They let objective reality take the hindmost.”

Hayes: “I tried other ways of asking the same question: ‘Anything of particular concern to you? Are you anxious or worried about anything? Are you excited about what’s been happening in the country in the last four years?’”

But those questions harvested “bewilderment” too. “As far as I could tell, the problem wasn’t the word ‘issue’… The undecideds I spoke to didn’t seem to have any intuitive grasp of what kinds of grievances qualify as political grievances.”

That’s the part that stuck with me word for word, almost two decades on. Some mentioned they were vexed by rising health care costs. “When I would tell them that Kerry had a plan to lower health-care premiums, they would respond in disbelief … as if you were telling them that Kerry was promising to extend summer into December.”

You would think these experimental results might be easily repeated, any time a journalist canvasses undecided voters. After a few times, you might think journalists might have adjusted how they conceptualize voters, as something besides bundles of issue opinions.

Nevertheless, they persisted.

CNN. September 18: “Harris isn’t giving the specifics some undecided voters say they want.” Multiple that a gajillion-fold, in the way gajillions of marine invertebrates make a coral reef, and you have the structure of agenda-setting in elite political journalism’s discourse about undecided voters and “issues.”

… Who are they, and how do they actually decide— if not, that is, by paying attention to issues?

… Millions of pages have been filled by scholars explaining the psychological appeal of fascism, most converging on the blunt fact that it offers the fantasy of reversion to an infantile state, where nothing can come and harm you, because you will be protected by an all-powerful figure who will always put you first, always put you first. It is simply indisputable that this promise can seduce and transform even intelligent, apparently mature, kind-hearted people formerly committed to liberal politics. I’ve written before in this column about the extraordinary film The Brainwashing of My Dad, in which director Jen Senko describes the transformation of her Kennedy-liberal dad under the influence of right-wing talk radio and Fox News— and also how, after she explained the premise of her film for a Kickstarter campaign, scores of people came out of the woodwork to share similar stories about their own family members.

I’ve learned a lot about the psychological dynamics at work from the Twitter feed of a psychologist named Julie Hotard, who drills down on the techniques Fox uses to trigger infantilization in viewers. The people at Fox who devise these scripts, one imagines, are pretty sophisticated people. Trump’s gift is to be able to grunt out the same stuff just from his gut. Trump’s appeals have become noticeably more infantile in precisely this way. When he addresses women voters, for instance: “I am your protector. I want to be your protector … You will no longer be abandoned, lonely, or scared. You will no longer be in danger …”

Or when he grunts the other side of the infantilizing promise: that he will be your vengeance. His promise to destroy anything placing you in danger. Like when he recently pledged to respond to “one really violent day” by meeting criminals with “one rough hour— and I mean real rough. The world will get out and it will end immediately.”

Or when he posted the Prayer to St. Michael the Archangel (“O Prince of the heavenly hosts, by the power of God, cast into hell Satan, and all the evil spirits, who prowl about the world seeking the ruin of souls”) illustrated by a 17th-century painting of said saint curb-stomping a defeated devil, about to run a sword through his head.

Even on the liberal-left, many interpret the way Trump seems even more to be going off the rails these last weeks as a self-defeating lack of control, or as a symptom of cognitive impairment. They almost seem to celebrate it. the New Republic’s email newsletter, which I cannot stand, is full of such therapeutic clickbaity headlines canvassing the same examples I talk about here: “Trump Proposes Stunningly Stupid Idea for Public Safety”; “Ex-Aide Says Trump’s ‘Creepy’ Message to Women Shows He’s Out of Touch”; “Trump Appears to Have Lost a Total Grasp on Things.”

I certainly don’t disagree that Trump is becoming more cognitively impaired and out of touch with reality. But might not these impairments render him a better fascist seducer, as his invitations to infantile regression become ever more primal, ever more basic, ever more pure?

Thus, finally, my hypothesis about undecided voters.

I imagine that what at least some of them— certainly more than those supposedly entering the two candidates’ issue positions onto spreadsheets to study, ruling out the candidate not “specific” enough about their fiscal policies— are undecided because they are poised at a threshold. “Undecided” is a way station between the final surrender to the Trumpian fantasy, and all the imaginary comforts it offers, and sticking with the rest of us in the reality-based community, despite all the existential terrors the real world affords.

Is my theory correct, or is it nonsense? Honestly, I can’t say— or can’t say without the kind of resources reporters from the New York Times, Washington Post, or the network news operations enjoy. Because to figure that out, you’d have to talk to people. I mean really talk to people. Which means, first, earning enough of their respect and trust to get them talking about how they really see the world.

Like, in 2004, Chris Hayes did— unburdened by the rigid conceptual frames that make it impossible to see politics as it is, instead of how our agenda-setting elite political journalists wish it to be.