Who, exactly, could be an undecided voter in 2024? It’s not as if the candidates do not draw a sufficient contrast. There can be few people alive these days, let alone few registered voters in America, who do not know much more than they ever thought they would about the habits, history, and inner psyche of Donald Trump, who has now been a singularly domineering force in national politics for nearly a decade. The Harris campaign has been trying to play their candidates’ comparative newness on the national stage as an asset, rigorously keeping her from saying much of substance, but Kamala Harris, too, is by now a well-known figure: once a popular and high profile senator from the country’s biggest state, she moved on to a busy, energetic, and extremely visible vice presidency.
The candidates are about as familiar to Americans as they’re going to get; anyone still saying they are “undecided” now, just four weeks out from the election, seems like the sort who has been paying so little attention that they’re not likely to remember to vote at all.
And yet it is this undecided voter, that irresistible phantom in American politics, who both candidates seem to be chasing as the race enters its final weeks. Both candidates seem, for lack of a better term, to be trying to cast themselves as making a pivot to the center, seemingly in a bid to convince this imaginary voter – the one who is apparently torn between a center-left bureaucrat of obvious competence and a raving, racist narcissist who wants to........