Across nation, undecided voters remain torn between candidates
■ Campaigns work the battlegrounds: President Donald Trump and rival Joe Biden went on offense Sunday, with each campaigning in states they are trying to flip during the election.
WASHINGTON — Amanda Jaronowski is torn. The lifelong Republican from suburban Cleveland supports President Donald Trump’s policies and fears her business could be gutted if Democrat Joe Biden is elected.
But she abhors Trump personally, leaving her on the fence about who will get her vote.
It’s a “moral dilemma,” Jaronowski said. “It would be so easy for him to win my vote if he could just be a decent human being,” she had said earlier during a focus group session.
Jaronowski is part of a small but potentially significant group of voters who say they’re undecided ahead of the Nov. 3 election. They have been derided as uninformed or lying by those who cannot fathom still being undecided, but conversations with a sampling of these voters
reveal a complicated tug of war.
Many, like Jaronowski, are longtime Republicans wrestling with what they see as a choice between two lousy candidates: a Democrat whose policies they cannot stomach and a Republican incumbent whose personality revolts them. Some voted for third-party candidates in 2016 because they were so repelled by their choices — Trump and Democrat Hillary Clinton — and may do so again. While polls show there are far fewer on-the-fence voters this year than the unusually high number in 2016, the Trump and Biden campaigns each believes it still can win over numbers that matter.
Cathy Badalamenti, 69, an independent from Lombard, Illinois, is struggling with her vote once again. In 2016, she voted for a third-party candidate after twice supporting Democrat Barack Obama.
“I’m not happy with anybody,” she said of her choices this time. That’s especially hard in a family of ardent Trump supporters who have balked at her indecision.
“Believe me, my son, my kids are looking at me and thinking, ‘How can you not like Trump?’ ” she said.
Badalamenti credits Trump for a booming economy before the pandemic, but she’s turned off by his knee-jerk reactions, worried about his interactions with world leaders, and believes he should think more before he speaks and tweets.
Biden worries her too: “I think he’s trying to make a good effort but at the same time he doesn’t know what’s — he’s only being told what’s going on.”
Longtime Republican pollster Frank Luntz, who has been running focus groups with undecided voters throughout the election sees a common refrain among many undecideds.
“They’re judging on two completely different attributes and they can’t decide
which is more important to them,” he said. “They don’t like Trump as a person, but they don’t feel badly about his administration or his policies. They really like Joe Biden as a person, but they are so nervous about what he’s going to do if he were elected. And so they can’t figure out which is more important to them.”
With two historically unpopular candidates, the 2016 race produced unusually large numbers of voters — double digits on the eve of the election — who told pollsters they were either undecided or planned to vote for third-party candidates. Many of those voters rallied around Trump in the final weeks of the campaign, helping to hand him victory.
Polls suggest there are far fewer on-the
fence voters this time around, but both campaigns believe they have the edge in an election where every vote could count.
“Frankly, I like our chances with them because President Trump has delivered results,” said Nick Trainer, Trump’s director of battleground strategy.
Biden’s campaign, which is ahead in polls nationally and a number of battleground states, voices similar optimism and argues those who are undecided historically break for the challenger.
Having so few undecided voters to move “is problematic if your candidate is not leading,” said Becca Siegel, the campaign’s chief analytics officer.
Some are making their own calculations. SamHillyer, 35, wholives in Fayetteville in northwest Arkansas, voted for third-party candidate Gary Johnson in 2016.
This time, he said, “it’s down to either Donald Trump, Jo Jorgensen, the Libertarian candidate, or possibly not voting in the presidential and voting for the other candidates.”
Hillyer, a dispatcher for a trucking company, has written off Biden, convinced the Democrat would raise taxes and take a more interventionist approach to foreign policy and, he said, it “doesn’t help with all the new kind of shady scandals popping up.”
Hillyer said he aligns with Jorgensen on most issues, but rejects the candidate’s support for abortion rights.
For now, he said, “I go back and forth maybe a couple times a day.”