Ranking the Undecideds

From our polls this week, here are all the races ranked in order of the percentage of undecideds:

Republican Treasurer 72
Republican Lieutenant Governor 69
Democratic Lieutenant Governor 65
Democratic Treasurer 64
Democratic Senate 58
Republican Governor 52
Democratic Superintendent 48
Democratic Governor 27
Republican President 10
Democratic President 8

What does it mean? You would expect the high visibility races- President, Governor, Senator- to have pretty low undecideds. That's the case for both presidential races and for the Democratic gubernatorial race. Not so much for the Democratic senate field or the Republican gubernatorial field though, both of which still have more than half of the respondents undecided.

That many undecideds means none of the candidates are even really capturing the attention of their fellow party members much less the general electorate. That doesn't mean it's impossible for Fred Smith, Bill Graham, Bob Orr, Kay Hagan, or Jim Neal to be successful next year but it does mean they need to start connecting with voters sooner than later if they're going to have a real chance.