R&R: In defense of undecided voters

Plus, what I’m reading and watching.

Happy Sunday! I hope you enjoyed the extra sleep this morning — one more hour of the 2024 campaign! Election Day is two days away. Welcome to R&R, my weekly email for paid subscribers recapping the previous week and recommending my favorite pieces of journalism. If you want to support my journalism — and get access to more content, like this week’s essay on undecided voters — click below to subscribe.

I usually set aside this space to make recommendations — and I will, don’t worry, later down — but I want to start this morning by sharing the rare anti-recommendation, a piece that really got under my skin.

Jeff Greenfield is a veteran pundit who has shared political analysis on all the major networks going back decades. This week in the Wall Street Journal, he offers his advice to undecided voters: “Stay home. It might be better for everyone that way.”

“Your participation,” he continues, “dilutes the value of genuinely considered votes, in the same way that a vintage wine will be spoiled by mixing it with a portion of plonk.”

In this, Greenfield joins a long line of commentators mocking America’s more fickle voters. More than a decade ago, SNL ran a sketch with Bill Hader and other “undecided voters” asking the real questions they wanted answered, like: “Who is the president right now? Is he or she running?” Just a few weeks ago, comedian Lewis Black uncorked one of his famous rants against them, calling undecided voters a “special group of morons.”

This type of voter-bashing has been going on for so long that, back in the 1960s, the eminent Harvard political scientist V. O. Key famously found it necessary to write in his final publication: “The perverse and unorthodox argument of this little book is that voters are not fools.”

But when I recently picked up a copy of Key’s book, “The Responsible Electorate,” I was surprised to find that his defense of the American voter was mounted on behalf of an entirely different demographic than I would have expected.