Large undecided segment will decide election

For months, pundits and the press have been peddling an obviously misguided theory of the American electorate: that all the voters have chosen one side or the other and thus there are almost no swing voters left. But a funny thing has happened. Since July the presidential horse race in public polls has gone from as much as an 8-point Kerry lead to as much as a 13-point Bush lead and is back again to a close race.

The reality is that for months about a quarter of the electorate has been unsure of its choice for president, and despite the hundreds of millions of dollars of partisan advertising and rhetoric, that quarter remains in play. The recent controversy over how many Democrats or Republicans are in public polls has obscured the fact that the largest party in America is no party — a plurality of American voters self-identify as independents, and they are the voters who will decide the election.

Why are the pundits so wrong? Because they bought into what people in both camps had a very real interest in selling. Liberals and conservatives wanted their respective candidates to believe that appealing to swing voters was ideologically weak, unprincipled and ineffective. They wanted to convince their candidates that the path to victory was to tack to the right or the left, thereby validating their own agendas on Election Day.

One result was that President Bush, who had at least run with a centrist moniker in 2000, took positions opposing popular stem cell research, pushing constitutional amendments to ban gay marriage and adopting far-out economic ideas such as cutting taxes on dividends. After his support declined to the low 40s, Bush woke up to the reality that swing voters were in play and presented a more centrist front at the Republican convention, which featured John McCain, Arnold Schwarzenegger and Rudy Giuliani.

After winning the Democratic primaries by knocking out the more liberally positioned Howard Dean, Sen. John Kerry had a large lead and emphasized his long-standing centrist views, pointing out that he voted for welfare reform and balanced budgets despite opposition within the Democratic Party. The image of the Democratic Party soared.

But after Bush changed his campaign tactics to tack back toward the center, Kerry believed his drop in the polls could be fixed by adding more "edge" to his message. He moved to make his opposition to Bush's conduct of the war in Iraq the centerpiece of his campaign message, a message with tremendous appeal to the Democratic base but whose appeal to swing voters is uncertain. Now there is a renewed opportunity to win back this group of voters who report that they have already definitely decided their vote, but who have repeatedly changed their minds this year.