Paging All Undecided Voters

Ross Douthat puts Obama's strategy thusly:

If you’re an undecided, stuck-in-the-middle kind of voter, the president isn’t meeting you halfway on the issues, or pledging to revive the dream of postpartisanship that he campaigned on last time. He’s just saying that you’ve got no choice but to stick with him, because Romney is too malignant to be trusted.

He goes on to explain that by taking this position, the president is putting himself at odds with the logic of lefty bloggers and MSNBC contributors, who seem to think that a stronger, more ideologically-driven liberalism would be a politically beneficial. But it's the president's logic that makes sense here. As Douthat puts it, the "undecided, stuck-in-the-middle" people are the ones to win. Those to whom greater liberalism is desirable aren't going to vote for the conservative if their incumbent liberal isn't liberal enough.

I think you get my point.

Contrary to the Romneyland logic, winning over the undecided voters won't be a simple matter of convincing the public that their president is an underperformer who hates small businesses. They'll have to combat the Obama-projected image of their candidate as a Mormon Scrooge with a penchant for outsourcing and a perverse affinity for tax-evasion. At its most practical level, this election like almost any other is really about persuading the persuadable. And there are many more such people than you might suspect:

According to a recent Washington Post/ABC News poll, just six per cent of Americans—or less than one-sixteenth of the electorate—think there’s a good chance that they will change their minds about the Presidential race before November. Only nineteen per cent of those polled said there was any chance they’d change their minds. For comparison’s sake, at a similar point in the 2008 election cycle, ten per cent of Americans said they were undecided, and twenty-five per cent said there was a chance they’d switch their choice. Former Clinton adviser Paul Begala recently noted in Newsweek that when you factor out the undecideds in securely red or blue states (since their votes won’t change the Electoral College results), the election comes down to “around 4 percent of the voters in six states.”

(Image via The Daily)