DCFOUNTAIN.COM

Graph: Comedy Central, via flyoverstate

From ‘The Daily Show’, Oct. 7, 2008

In the final weeks preceding every presidential election, the media drive the American electorate into extreme fits of either boredom or anxiety, depending on one’s level of engagement in the electoral process, by hopelessly obsessing over polls and a mysterious segment of voters that — it turns out — may barely even exist at all.

Entire truck caravans laden with barrels of ink — and their present-day electronic equivalent — are devoted each election cycle to analyzing the thoughts, attitudes and leanings of the “undecided” voter. Yet, as Ezra Klein points out today in the Los Angeles Times, not since 1960 — or by a different metric since 1976 — have such voters actually determined the outcome of a U.S. presidential election.

This myth of the undecided voter is perpetuated despite evidence suggesting that, with just a month to go before casting their ballot, the vast majority — as much as four in five — of those who tell pollsters they have not yet decided on a candidate actually are playing the pollsters as they would a poker game — with their cards held close to their chests, the value known only to them.

Studies show that such voters typically tend to be more rural, older and less educated than the average voter. They indeed come from both sides of the political aisle. Yet in this election year, as a product of the South, I feel fully qualified to wager that a vastly disproportionate share of these voters reside deep in red-state America and, more specifically, well below the Mason-Dixon line — where many are hyper-sensitive to being perceived as anything remotely resembling racist.

Faced with a pollster’s intrusion into their most intimate thoughts and attitudes, these undecideds would rather project an appearance of indecisiveness than to risk being labeled as unwilling to support a candidate whose skin color happens to differ from their own. This is true despite the availability of numerous policy positions they potentially could cite as masked reasons for supporting the non-minority candidate.

In this year featuring the first-ever general election candidate who is African-American, the result well could be a contortive snapshot of the electorate marked by inflated ranks of so-called undecided voters — which in most recent polls total between 7 and 10 percent. Even that relatively small margin seems quite surprising at this late stage, given the dramatically different positions of the two candidates on most every key issue.

A recent study by the Associated Press and Yahoo News in conjunction with Stanford University suggests that these hidden racial undertones in the 2008 election could translate into a general-election margin of as much as six percentage points — certainly enough to offset much of Sen. Barack Obama’s current lead, reducing it to barely above — or even within — the margin-of-error range. (Full study is available here in PDF format.)

Let’s hope this nation has come farther along the trail of racial evolution than this study suggests. We cannot afford to allow a God-given trait such as skin color to stand in the way of electing the candidate with the intellect and judgment needed to resolve some of the most dire economic and foreign policy challenges America ever has faced.

As Pennsylvania Gov. Ed Rendell so sensibly put it recently, someone who finds himself drowning in the middle of a river doesn’t care if the person on shore who throws him a life preserver is black, white, brown, orange or fuchsia. And while we’re at it, let’s add red and blue to that palette.