Atrios wonders why there are still undecideds at this point.
There's an element that you encounter in known swing states (Ohio in particular) where it's a badge of honor to be "undecided" up until the last minute. It shows that you're not only not being swayed by all the sundry things that the media tells them they shouldn't be swayed by yet parrots in order to sway them. It's a feedback loop - there's a heightened niche status given to not making a decision until the last possible minute which reinforces the necessity among some of not even thinking about making a decision.
Undecideds exist in large part because they're fetishized for existing, and because they're continually given all the tools of false equivocation and wrongheaded cynicism in order to justify that self-promoting fetish. There are only two real tools needed to remain undecided, because they cancel each other out - the first is the driving, voracious hunger for "specifics" and the second is the unyielding hatred of anything even resembling "not talking to people like me". A plan to do X is both lacks specifics because the person describing it said it in a straightforward fashion with the assumption that they would use the requisite abilities of their job to accomplish it and, when the details of doing it are revealed, it lacks the "everyman" quality that the first statement had. Then, having been led to assume that the style of delivering drastically different plans falls into one of those two categories at every juncture, undecideds then get to assume that there's no real difference between competing politicians because they all say the same thing (by which they mean it falls into one of two vague categories of delivery).
Eventually, they go into the voting booth and make a choice based on who knows what, helping choose someone as the next president for reasons that in no way demonstrate the alleged close attention they've been paying for the past several weeks. And we then spend the next four years wondering if this president can sway those same voters to their side for the vital issues of the day that they've never heard of and will pay no substantive attention to until the last possible minute.
