How Clinton and Trump Can Win Undecided Voters
Really? Are there undecided voters left?
Yes, as hard as it may be for most of us to believe, after putting up with the ads and sound bites of the presidential race for more than a year, polls show almost 10 percent of voters still haven't made up their minds.
That's typical. I used to make fun of such voters. I thought they were pathologically indecisive, like people in a supermarket checkout line who go into paralysis when asked to choose paper or plastic.
But give them some respect. With national polls and some crucial battleground states tightening up into a virtual dead heat, the holdouts deserve new respect. There are more than enough of them to decide whether experienced Democrat Hillary Clinton or entertaining Republican Donald Trump will be our next president.
To get more insight into their frame of mind, I spent Friday evening with a roomful of undecided voters on the other side of two-way mirror from me and about a dozen other journalists.
Republican pollster Frank Luntz, a superstar convener of focus groups, organized the three-hour session for AARP in Alexandria, a pearl on the Potomac River in the important battleground state of Virginia.
The group consisted of 30 people, including 11 women by my count, a range of age brackets and a sprinkling of black, Hispanic and Asian-Americans. Ten said they voted for President Barack Obama twice, 15 voted against him twice, four said they had voted for him once.
The latter included at least one of the black men. He said he voted for Republican Sen. John McCain in 2008. That surprised me for a moment. Blacks who voted against Obama even once -- and admit it -- are almost as rare as unicorns. But getting past our stereotypes to find out how voters really feel is why we turn to focus groups.
This group of voters was fed up and they let us know it. They didn't like either major party's nominee.
When Luntz asked for one-word descriptions of Clinton, participants called out responses like "deceitful," "slimy," "liar," "untrustworthy" and "corruption." Trump was described just grumpily as "crazy," "unstable," "unbalanced," "arrogant," "a bigot," a "buffoon" and "megalomaniac."
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