A Golf Analogy

MSNBC's Lawrence O'Donnell recently said this about [still] undecided voters, and whether another presidential debate would make a difference:

I doubt it because it looks like the electorate is locked in pretty tight right now.... You gotta remember something about the undecided voters: They don't like this. It's not like they're undecided because they're thinking about it and it's a really hard decision. It's like me being undecided on which golf club to use, having never owned a golf club and I don't care about golf. And I never watch the Golf Channel, ever.

So the idea, he said, has always been to hold the usual media content of sitcoms and dramas hostage and force the undecideds to watch political content and ads. But that doesn't work anymore, because they have lots of other options now because of the interweb.

This makes a lot of sense to me as a way to explain the truly undecided people who turn up in those panels of undecided voters the media loves to put together.

Earlier in the podcast, law professor Kate Shaw pointed out that the Electoral College is bad not just because it undermines the principle of one-person, one-vote, but also because it encourages gaming the system through the many varied election/voting rules within each of the shifting swing states. 

She didn't even mention the fact that it leaves the election up to the most under-informed people in those states, but that also seems to be a problem.

__

O'Donnell said this while talking with Rachel Maddow during the last quarter of a Why Is This Happening podcast. It was part of a live event held on September 7, 2024.