Undecided voters in Pennsylvania told me what they really think about Harris and Trump | Opinion

A common misconception about “undecided voters” is that they are largely made up of people waiting to make a last-minute impulsive decision between the two major party candidates, former President Donald Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris. There are some voters like that, despite what you may gather from the comment sections online. But the modal “undecided” voter, at least based on my recent conversations across Pennsylvania, is more likely to be someone who is deciding between voting and not voting.

“My thing is, if I vote, does it change anything?” said Sergio Martinez, an Amazon warehouse worker in Bethlehem, Pa. “Does it make a difference? Because they will do what they want, no matter what.” When pushed, Martinez seems like a very convincing voter for Trump; He said Harris “seems like she's always lying” and reported positive memories of the economy during Trump's first term. But despite a negative view of Harris and a somewhat positive view of Trump, he doubted it was worth his time to vote.

Martinez represents a large and untapped pool of potential GOP voters who say they would prefer Trump but lack the motivation to go out and actually vote for him.

“I don’t believe in the system at all,” said Jesse, a 25-year-old hotel worker from Phoenixville, Pa. “If I didn’t understand that the voting process was kind of useless and I was involved, I would probably vote for Trump,” he said. “The media atmosphere is overwhelmingly liberal and that’s really annoying.”

Jesse, who declined to give his last name, may well be the prototypical “low-propensity” voter that a competent Republican machine would work overtime to elect: young, male, tired of monocultural liberal mores and looking for an alternative. Instead, Jesse says he probably won't vote this week.

“I didn't have any problems when Trump was there – I thought he was fine before, but I don't really know who's doing what this year. I just can’t keep up,” said Farah Washington of Norristown. PA told me while shopping at Walmart with her nine-year-old son. “If I had to choose one, I would choose Trump.” As for Kamala Harris, Washington said, “She just seems weird to me” — especially how Harris achieved the position she now holds. But Washington says she probably won't vote in the end. She's another potential Trump voter who clearly slipped through the cracks.

At the King of Prussia Mall, I spoke with Raheem Moody, who reported having previously voted for Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton. But this time he has no plans to vote at all. “I really, frankly, don’t see any significant difference no matter who is in office, either for myself or for my community,” Moody said, although if he had to choose, he would choose Trump. “I do think that a lot of the things they’re saying in the media right now are just scaremongering.”

A related but special breed of undecided voters are those who are so fed up with the endless barrage of political advertising that they simply try to tune out the noise. At a sandwich shop in Nazareth, Pennsylvania, an employee told me how upset she was about the absurd amount of mailings and advertisements she was inundated with daily, which had left her feeling alienated from the prospect altogether to make a decision vote. She just doesn't want to think about it.

Harris' final message was certainly not intended to appeal to this particular demographic. According to a recent Gallup poll, 71 percent of Americans are “dissatisfied with the current situation in the United States.” Since this would obviously spell trouble for the incumbent party, Harris has largely tried to change the subject, for example by marching along with Liz Cheney, to win the support of highly engaged, news-attentive Republican voters who were repulsed by Trump.

But Trump has also failed to seal the deal with a strikingly broad base of potential voters who express some sympathy for him but who have not yet been given sufficient reason to believe that the vote will advance their interests, or at all would be important. Less common, at least in my anecdotal observations, are potential Kamala Harris voters who need that extra push — especially because their antipathy toward Trump is already such a crucial motivating factor.

Nearly universal, however, is dismay over the entire electoral process, with Pennsylvania being ground zero for a relentless stream of partisan propaganda.

That's something you're hearing from campaigners who swarmed the state this weekend to drum up support for their candidates. Many reported encountering hostility at the doorstep – not necessarily towards one candidate or another, but because of the constant intrusive “contacting”. Tune in to network television in Pennsylvania now and you'll be treated to up to five consecutive political commercials; Apparently no other commercial products are allowed to be promoted in the final days before an election, aside from billionaire-funded partisan intimidation.

These “undecided” voters are not crazy or stupid or even necessarily indifferent to political matters. Instead, they are rationally distanced from both parties, are fundamentally skeptical of both candidates and have doubts about the electoral process in general. This is despite the furious drumbeat of intimidation urging them to vote as if it were some kind of sacrosanct moral duty. A large portion of voters, particularly those in the lower middle classes, simply do not view voting as some grandiose metaphysical imperative; They see it more as an annoyance and a humiliation, something they may or may not be willing to do.

Michael Tracey is an independent reporter at Substack. Find him at www.mtracey.net. Follow him on Twitter @mtracey.

The views expressed in this article are the author's own.