A., courtesy of Mark Blumenthal, Charles Franklin and NJ: doesn't look like it.
Typically, pollsters can say little about the undecided voters on their final surveys because the single-digit percentages yield (at best) only a few dozen respondents for analysis. However, the massive rolling-average national tracking surveys offer a unique opportunity to put larger-than-average samples of undecided voters under an analytical microscope.The pollsters at Financial Dynamics were kind enough to share with Charles Franklin and me the raw, respondent-level data from more than 3,449 interviews conducted from Oct. 1 to Oct. 22 for the Diageo/Hotline poll.
We can learn two things from this data. First, roughly 6 percent of the respondents were initially undecided, but split almost evenly (47 percent for Obama, 53 percent for McCain, n=193) when pushed for how they "lean."
Second, Franklin constructed a statistical model to predict the vote choice among those who expressed a preference, then ran the model among the 267 respondents who were completely undecided. This process allows us to draw on every variable that seems predictive of vote preference -- including party identification, age, race, gender, education, frequency of church attendance and geographic region -- and use it to predict how the currently undecided voters will ultimately "break."
Franklin's finding? The model predicts that the totally undecided voters in this sample will split 54 percent for Obama and 46 percent for McCain (more details on Franklin's model here).
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