From The LA Times
By Ezra Klein

Tuesday’s debate may have starred Barack Obama and John McCain, but it wasn’t really about them. Rather, it was about an odd and extremely powerful creature in American electoral politics: the Undecided Voter. It was the Undecided Voter whom Gallup asked to submit the questions. It was the Undecided Voter who filled the audience. It was the Undecided Voter who turned the dials controlling CBS’ squiggly reaction lines and recorded his (or her) responses for CBS’ postelection survey.

It’s a bit odd that we give the Undecided Voter such a privileged place in American elections. Because from a civic standpoint, few creatures are as contemptible. This election has dominated every form of American news media for the better part of two years. Newspapers, magazines, networks, cable, radio, blogs, people on street corners with signs — it’s really been rather hard to miss. Further, it pits two extremely different candidates against each other. Whether your metric is age, ideology, temperament, race, funding sources, healthcare plans or Iraq strategies, it would be hard to imagine two men presenting a starker contrast.

But despite this, the Undecided Voter wakes up each morning and says, in effect, “I dunno.” And the political system panders to him. Undecided voters are believed to be the decisive slice of the American electorate, so they get the debates and the ads and the focus groups (assuming, that is, that they live in a battleground state).

Political-science research on undecided voters remains a bit sparse, in part because it’s hard to pin down who, exactly, they are. It’s not a static population. At least initially, we’re all undecided voters. More of us are undecided in May than in October.

And even now, when most of us have settled into our preferences, change remains possible. If Obama personally collars Osama bin Laden during a fact-finding trip in Afghanistan, a lot of die-hard Republicans will switch their vote. Similarly, if McCain emerges from one of his 12 garages and explains that he was doing some tinkering and came up with a cheap, clean, renewable, plentiful energy source, the polls will swing.

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