Is there a breakdown of what percentage of voters are undecided because they haven’t been following the campaign as opposed to those who have been but are waiting until close to the election to decide who they support? And if so is there any information on which way these two groups are starting to lean?
They still need answers. Answers to questions like “When is the election?” and “What is oil?”
According to a poll by NBC and The Wall Street Journal, undecided voters are younger moderates who haven’t been paying attention to the campaigns and aren’t even sure if they’ll be voting. So willfully uninformed, I’d say.
I agree that most who identify as “undecided” are probably just uninformed and/or indifferent, but I think a few are more ambivalent than undecided.
I know that I’ve talked to more than a few center-right type people who think Obama is a socialist, but are also very uncomfortable with a lot of the current insanity on the right, especially on social issues. So basically they don’t REALLY want to vote for either side, are (mostly I think) going to vote for Obama, but just aren’t really that enthused about or eager to identify themselves as “Obama supporters.”
I think there’s a category of “I’m disappointed in Obama, but Jesus Christ, Romney…” voters.
Best username-post combination ever.
I’m an undecided voter who has been paying attention, I just don’t like either of the candidates. I’m no political genius, but I think that’s true of most voters even if they are paying attention.
I don’t really care that 1% of the population has buckets of money and doesn’t pay taxes, I don’t care that Bin Laden is dead, being pro-choice or not isn’t going to swing my vote. What matters to me right now is which one of these guys is going to bring us back to a place where people who want jobs can get them and those jobs pay enough to cover food and shelter and health care and education and maybe a vacation for the family every year.
Both candidates talk a lot about the middle class, but neither of them talk about people who can’t afford dinner for their family. Obama says give me four more years but four more years of shitty could be disastrous. Romney says put me in coach but I still don’t understand exactly what his intentions are so he could just make things worse.
Also I get the impression that most people who have decided are just voting against the other guy rather than for specific policies they agree with, and I don’t think that’s any better than being undecided.
Neither one would be able to get their policies through intact anyway.
I think, for President, it’s better to consider things like judicial appointments and on broad positions on things like military intervention, taxes, social issue, etc. than to get bogged down in policy statements that are just campaign props anyway.
Jesus Christ, what are you doing in this forum? Would you please get over to Great Debates and settle some of them?
And no more fucking parables! A STRAIGHT YES OR NO!
One of my disciples once asked me, “why do you Rabbis always answer a question with a question?” I said, “Why should a Rabbi not answer a question with a question?”
Question for you moejoe,
If you don’t care about the first part, where do you think the federal government will come up with the funds to accomplish the second part?
That’s a great question, and I don’t know the answer. What I’m hearing from the candidates doesn’t really help me answer it either.
Here’s the basic problem: I can’t see how raising or lowering taxes on anyone fixes the problem. I don’t have a clear understanding of how Obama will use increased taxes to create jobs, is it by funding the repair of roads and bridges? It seems like there are only so many to fix and the work will be finished at some point and then what? Go back and fix the ones we started with? This helps a certain segment of the population involved with fixing roads and bridges, but what about everyone else?
On the other hand I don’t believe that allowing business owners to pay lower taxes means they’ll hire more people or create more jobs, I think they’ll just enjoy higher profits and keep crushing the souls of their workers because who is going to quit when there are no other jobs?
It bothers me that I don’t understand these things and so am undecided. It bothers me even more that it’s difficult to understand in the first place. Maybe if we could have a truly unbiased entity create pop-up videos of the debates explaining what’s true, what’s not true, and what exactly their talking points actually mean it would be easier to make a decision.
It boils down to “trickle down” vs. “trickle up”.
For “trickle down” you take the rich folks who have lots of money and can’t find good investments to make even more money, then you cut their taxes. They’ve got even more money, so they hire extra people to make stuff. Those extra people they hired then take the money from their new jobs and buy other things from other people. Since people are now buying stuff, it justifies the job creators hiring all those extra people to make stuff in the first place.
“Trickle up” is just the other way around. The government authorizes stimulus like fixing bridges, etc. As you point out, that makes jobs for bridge repairers, but then just as above, those new jobs put money in people’s pockets, so they start buying stuff, that second level of buying generates demand in other fields, so they hire more people to make stuff to sell to the bridge repairers, and so forth.
The only real difference is where you start things off – Do you give the rich people (the “job creators”) with extra money even more money so they can create jobs making stuff there is not yet demand for? Or do you take the unemployed bridge repairers who have no money and are receiving (or worse have run out of) unemployment and put them to work?
Thank you, that’s very helpful. I would pick #2, put the bridge builders to work because it sounds like that actually starts with creating jobs rather than #1 which eventually results in creating jobs.
So, let’s take a single person making less than $30,00 per year as something other than a bridge builder. In other words he already has a job but he’s barely making ends meet - rent, taxes, insurance premium, groceries, Netfix and a bus pass and the paycheck is spent. How will his life be different with choices one and two?
With #1, he has to hope that the people with lots of money (who now get even more money), will invest that extra money in the (example person’s) company (even if there is no demand yet for the companies products. In other words, he’s hoping they will take risks that nobody is currently willing to take. He has to hope that the people with extra money will not send it overseas, or simply sit on it, waiting for the economy to improve.
With #2, he has to hope that the formerly unemployed or underemployed people who now have money will spend that money on stuff like food, rent, toys for the kids, a used car, etc. The hope is that this will then spread the money around the economy relatively quickly, increasing demand and the (example person) will benefit from this money moving through the entire economy, rather than being stuck in a relatively few bank accounts in the Caymans or Switzerland.
Also very helpful. Ok, with #2, how exactly will he benefit from money moving through the entire economy?
Some undecideds are informed but genuinely don’t know which way to go. If a person is mostly uninterested in ideology and more interested in competence and integrity, then choosing a candidate becomes significantly more complicated.
My first GOP vote was actually for John McCain in 2008. Before that I’d voted for Perot, Perot, Gore, and Kerry. My ideology hasn’t changed, I’ve always been conservative/libertarian, but I pick Presidents based more on trust and competence than ideology. I voted for Perot because he was a straight-talker and a businessman. I voted for Gore and Kerry because well, GWB. 'Nuff said. But John McCain made it easy for me, since I’d been a big fan of his for a long time. And Romney’s another easy choice because he has a proven record as a leader and manager and his opponent is just GWB with better speeches.
Now Congress, I generally vote straight GOP unless I have an issue with an incumbent being corrupt.
You could tax the rich at 75% across all income sources, and that will not put a dent in the debt. Here’s a cite John Mace provided in another thread. moejoe, we are $16 trillion in debt, we borrow over 30 cents of every dollar we spend, and Federal entitlements, as they currently exist, cannot be sustained and will add to the debt. We’re in a downward spiral, and this “tax the rich” fetish is cowardly pandering. Frankly, sometimes I wish the GOP would just give on this, and reveal it for the nothing that it is.
moejoe, my advice (which you didn’t ask for!) is do your research and dig beneath the sound bites until you get to facts or at least supportable conclusions. You’ll tax the rich? Okay, what effect will that have? “Lots of good stuff” and “fairness” aren’t answers. “It will raise $X in tax revenue” is one. Then you can decide if this is a meaningful strategy, worth all the debate and media coverage.
To the OP, I say they are mostly (not all!) uninformed. Every time I watch one of those undecided focus groups they question in a sequestered room after a debate, they all remind me of my mom. “Oh, they’re both just confusing me. Nobody can explain anything.” Okay, Mom. This is just indecipherable, okee-dokee.
Interesting.
I followed the same trajectory, for the same reasons. Perot, Perot, Gore, Kerry. GWB was clearly poison. I intended to vote for McCain in 2008, and sent him a tidy contribution when he went broke in the primary and was trailing Huckabee.
Then Obama happened, and here we diverge mightily. I’ve never cast a more confident vote. I expected him to act like a moderate, and he has done so to my great satisfaction. I intend to vote for him again.
The point illustrated here, I hope, is that being undecided is not evidence of inattention. I resent the assumption made by ideologues that anybody who hasn’t chosen one of their simplistic worldviews by election day must be an uncaring dolt.
I don’t think anyone has actually proposed taxing the rich at 75%.
The tax proposals are increasing taxes on the rich by a few percent or so, and holding the rest steady vs. cut everyone’s tax rate 20% across the board.
On the entitlements one side is cutting $716 Billion from medicare reimbursements, then got brutally demonized for that by the other side in ads and both debates.
The other side says they won’t touch medicare spending (though they did go ahead and copy the $716 Billion cut into their budget proposal too) or other entitlement spending, and in fact is proposing to increase defense spending significantly.
Who exactly is using “cowardly pandering”?