Forget the Undecided Voters, Will it be the Uninformed Voters That Will Decide the Election?

By now most of you have seen the video spoof by SNL about the uninformed voter. It was a great video and at the same time scary because it may not be too far off from the truth. Ezra Klein has an interesting opinion piece out today and he believes that the uninformed will be the real factor in this election. Just how uninformed are people? According to Klein's piece:

Lynn Vavreck, a political scientist at the University of California at Los Angeles, says that uninformed voters have roughly the same relationship to politics that I have to baseball.

“They are lower on political information, for sure. That’s a function of being not that interested and not paying attention,” she said. “It’s not that they can’t comprehend the information, or that they’re at a balancing point and can’t decide. They’re just not dialed in. They’re not getting all the information you or I are getting.”

Vavreck asked thousands of voters -- both decided and undecided -- a battery of basic, multiple-choice questions about who’s who in politics. The questions were designed to be easy. You didn’t have to know that John Boehner is Speaker of the House. You just had to know he is a congressman rather than a judge or the vice president.

According to Vavreck’s polling, only 35 percent of undecided voters could identify Boehner’s job as “congressman.” Only 69 percent could say that Joe Biden is the vice president rather than, say, a representative. Only 17 percent can identify Chief Justice John Roberts as a judge.

Decided voters have an easier time rattling off the job titles of Boehner and Biden, as well as those of Harry Reid, Eric Cantor, Mitch McConnell and Nancy Pelosi. (Interestingly, they struggle more than undecideds to identify Roberts.)

That’s likely because decided voters are paying more attention to the election. About 43 percent of decided voters say they’re following the presidential election “very closely.” Only 12 percent of undecided voters say the same.

Whether you are Republican or Democrat you can't be happy that only 69% of people knew who Joe Biden was. Should we really let those who have no clue vote?