What is the 2012 election about?

There are, of course, many possible answers to this question. According to President Barack Obama, “this election is about our economic future.” House Speaker John Boehner agrees, albeit with a twist. “This election is going to be a referendum on the president’s failed economic policies,” he said last month. In a recent fundraising appeal, Massachusetts Democratic Senate candidate Elizabeth Warren put it this way: “This election is about values. It’s about what kind of people we are and what kind of country we want to build.” Mitt Romney maintains that the election is about nothing less than “the soul of America.”

Depending on how you look at things, all of these characterizations could be correct, or none of them. On a practical level, though, what this election is really about is persuading those voters who remain persuadable. In this context, what’s noteworthy about the Romney-Obama contest is that, with three months still to go before Election Day, there aren’t very many of them. According to a recent Washington Post/ABC News poll, just six per cent of Americans—or less than one-sixteenth of the electorate—think there’s a good chance that they will change their minds about the Presidential race before November. Only nineteen per cent of those polled said there was any chance they’d change their minds. For comparison’s sake, at a similar point in the 2008 election cycle, ten per cent of Americans said they were undecided, and twenty-five per cent said there was a chance they’d switch their choice. Former Clinton adviser Paul Begala recently noted in Newsweek that when you factor out the undecideds in securely red or blue states (since their votes won’t change the Electoral College results), the election comes down to “around 4 percent of the voters in six states.”

“I did the math so you won’t have to,” Begala continued. “Four percent of the presidential vote in Virginia, Florida, Ohio, Iowa, New Mexico, and Colorado is 916,643 people. That’s it. The American president will be selected by fewer than half the number of people who paid to get into a Houston Astros home game last year.”

Two political scientists, Larry Bartels, of Vanderbilt University, and Lynn Vavreck, of U.C.L.A., recently tried to figure out who those few voters still up for grabs actually are. They sifted through multiple surveys, involving a total of ten thousand respondents, and came up with a sample of five hundred and ninety-two people who truly seemed undecided. Bartels and Vavreck determined that only thirty per cent of the undecideds were genuine Independents, while forty per cent lean Democratic and slightly more than twenty per cent lean Republican.

Undecided voters tend to get a bad rap. “To put them in perspective,” the author David Sedaris wrote in Shouts & Murmurs shortly before the election of 2008, “I think of being on an airplane. The flight attendant comes down the aisle with her food cart and, eventually, parks it beside my seat. ‘Can I interest you in the chicken?’ she asks. ‘Or would you prefer the platter of shit with bits of broken glass in it?’ ”

Or to put it another way: “After two years and billions of dollars, our presidential election is going to come down to a few undecided voters in key swing states,” Stephen Colbert joked recently. “The fate of our country in now in the hands of people who don’t think about what they want until they get right up to the register at McDonald’s.”

Bartels and Vavreck’s research suggests that this rap rests on a solid foundation. The undecideds, they write, “are rather less knowledgeable about politics, and much more likely to say they follow news and public affairs ‘only now and then’ or ‘hardly at all.’ (Almost 40 percent are unsure which party currently has more members in the House of Representatives, and another 20 percent wrongly answered that it was the Democrats.)”

If the 2012 campaign is really “about” swaying nine hundred sixteen thousand six hundred and forty-three “less knowledgeable” voters in half a dozen states, then everything else—the referendum on economic policy, the battle over values, the fight for the “soul of America”—is just a sideshow. Of course, you probably already knew this, because you’ve been paying attention. In which case, you’ve already decided.

Illustration by Maximilian Bode.