And in the opposite of data-driven, here’s a great anecdote to suggest one counter-intuitive rationale for undecideds breaking Obama’s way: wanting to be on the “correct” side of history.

Whether overtly expressed or not, we knew this was the profile of a significant fraction of the undecideds, for a long while. Having canvassed them in New Hampshire, I can offer first hand substantiation of those descriptors.

My concern is not about the numbers – it’s a philosophical one, which I had raised in the alumni course you taught in the fall. Given that democracy works best with an informed electorate, how can we expect the will of the people to be served when elections repeatedly degenerate to the whim of the least capable element of the populace – one which is uneducated, ignorant and fundamentalist ?

I comment somewhat in frustration but I do realize that there are always ways to constructively resolve this problem. The candidate’s campaigns and the frames they use are supposed to educate the undecideds and help them make up their minds. If this is to work, then the % of undecideds should decline monotonically over time since the campaigns began, till by the last week of the elections, you should effectively see very few undecideds. But you don’t. It’s as if the campaigns cancel each other out leaving the undecideds in a fog of..er..indecision. How can we help these people ? Or more appropriately, what should the characteristics of a system that allows for a robust reflection of an informed electorate be ?