“Romney’s main focus was on the non-existent but otherwise undecided middle with moderate views.”
An excellent post. This election has made clear to me what I understood only vaguely before.
The country is neither “center-right” nor “center-left”. The center, while numerically large, is politically impotent and in the war of ideas insignificant.
On Election Day, they follow the strong horse like the hopeless and weak morons they are.
HW Bush, Dole, Kerry, McCain and now Romney all lost by pleading with this “middle” rather than slapping them hard in the face and saying “follow me”. Obama obviously understood this - my G-d, look what he just sold the nation!
As I’ve said before, Bush was our Clinton (I had a long post on this after he came to our town in July 99). Romney was our Kerry. Sarah Palin is our Obama.
Individuals can be whatever they want, but for the most part if they want their votes to count they gotta' go one way or the other.
That's why I am always very careful to differentiate VOTERS from the various broad classes of people we use to discuss politics.
Now, about people who don't vote ~ the last serious discussion of that situation focused on the number of about 90 million adults who are eligible to vote but don't. They are not exactly UNDECIDED ~ they just don't do it. It used to be proportantely larger. They are probably the 35% or thereabouts who never responded to polls of any kind ~ not ever! Check that Pew report discussion at http://pjmedia.com/tatler/2012/09/30/we-are-the-91-only-9-of-americans-cooperate-with-pollsters/ ~ goes way beyond the original report's parameters, but 53% who can actually be reached by a pollster yet they refuse to deal with the polls.
That's probably a chunk of the 90 million adults who don't vote!
These people may well not have a political bone in their bodies, but we'll never know that because they don't let us know their opinions nor do they vote!
Do they use social media, do they listen to music, do they watch television, do they have babies, do they engage in abortion, do they buy, do they sell, do they drive cars, do they walk down the street, do they live in houses, do they........... whatever ~ we can never know because they won't tell us yet, we do a census on a regular basis that somehow gets them to tell us about how many toilets they have. On the other hand do they know if they have an hispanic surname, or were their people from Cornwall ~ maybe they just don't want to know, nor for you to know what they don't know, or don't care to know. Census may get as far into it as is possible, but seriously, with this dramatic revelation that only 9% of people polled provide any kind of answer, just how accurate and meaningful is our census data?