Gloria Raymond has watched on cable the talking heads on the left and on the right. For a year she has listened to the news, tuned in to the debates and taken in the stump speeches so she could make a wise choice for president.
But with only four days left, this 72-year-old retired Bob Evans waitress from Tallahassee, Fla., remains one of the undecided voters whom Barack Obama and John McCain are desperately courting in key battleground states. As far as she's concerned, there is only one thing that would help her make up her mind.
"I'm waiting for one of them to shoot himself in the leg," she said, meaning the foot, which she would also like to see Democrat Obama or Republican McCain put in his mouth. "If one of them would do something that would make it so clear. . . . To tell you the truth, I feel the same about either one."
Raymond is one of a dwindling but crucial pack of voters who are both revered and reviled in the electoral system. They have been spotlighted on cable news shows, pandered to by the candidates and skewered on comedy television ("chronically insecure . . . attention-seekers . . . people who get their heads stuck in jars while eating pickles").
There is little research on undecided voters because they are an ever-changing population -- those who equivocate in one election cycle might not in another. A study of presidential elections at State University of New York at Buffalo found that the last time wafflers made a difference was 1960.
But this year, they look to be significant again. A Los Angeles Times/Bloomberg poll this week shows that this wavering wing of the electorate -- 6% in Florida and 8% in Ohio -- is large enough to make the difference in those battlegrounds.
The rest of the nation, minds made up and marching by the thousands to vote early, has begun to wonder: What's up with those people? They are, after all, faced with two starkly different men, from different generations, with different ideas, revealed and vetted in perhaps the longest campaign cycle ever.
Raymond and several others surveyed from Florida and Ohio explained their thinking in follow-up interviews this week, revealing an earnest if conflicted lot, deliberative by nature, particularly in decisions of consequence.
When it comes to dogs or her 2001 Ford Focus, Raymond, for example, tends to take a long time deciding.
