Swingers

Ezra Klein continues on his crusade to prove there are very few real "swing voters." He writes:

Examining the 2004 election, [researchers] Clymer and Winneg asked the 4% of their sample that claimed to be undecided to rate the two candidates in early October. When they went back to the same people after the election, more than 80% had in fact voted for whichever candidate they'd rated most highly a month earlier. They weren't undecided so much as reluctant to express a preference.

OK, let's take a look at that number. Suppose "true" swing voters use a coin flip to decide whether to change their votes from the candidate they supported earlier. If that were true, we'd need 40% of so-called "undecideds" to be true swing voters in order to see 20% change their votes. 40% of 4% is 1.6%. So it's possible that 1.6% of voters decide their votes on a coin flip on election day! That's more than the Bush-Gore margin in 2000.

But of course, if the coin flippers keep flipping coins, they're a wash. Not worth convincing or talking to or persuading. Collectively, they're not swing voters at all, because collectively they split their vote 50-50 no matter what. The real swing voters aren't "undecideds," they're people who say they've made up their minds and later change their minds. How many of those people truly change their minds over an election cycle? My guess is we'll never know.

Here's what I see to be Ezra Klein's line of thinking: The undecideds aren't really undecided, so we (Democrats) should focus less on the "median voter" and more on turning out the base. In other words, we should adopt the Karl Rove strategy. But look where the Rove strategy got the Republican party - thanks to a generation of Republicans who weren't subject to the scrutiny of the "median voter," the party has now been at least temporarily rejected by many of its former faithful. And so McCain is way behind in the polls.

So here's the lesson: true "swing voters" swing over the course of several elections. And they are mostly centrists. It's worth appealing to those voters, even if it it's already too late to change the outcome of this year's election.