obama headquarters operation vote

Business Insider/Grace Wyler

In Virginia, neither of the ground games cared about undecided voters anymore. 

The reason why is pretty simple. The candidates are out there, there are plenty of resources available that undecideds can use to make a choice, and the ads on the air are designed to win them over anyway.

The campaigns have now turned their focus to people who have made up their mind, but are inconsistent or "sporadic" voters. 

A Democrat who voted in 2004 and 2010 but doesn't get to the polls every year is the ideal target of the Obama campaign. In Virginia, this means handing them an absentee ballot or making sure they have an election day plan. In Ohio, it means getting them to vote early. 

Consider this: Gallup's polls of registered voters indicate 48% support Obama and 48% support Mitt Romney as of Tuesday. Gallup's polls of likely voters indicate that only 46% support Obama while 51% support Mitt Romney. 

The whole plan, at least for the Obama campaign, is to prove this likely voter model wrong. They want the election outcome to look more like the registered voter polls than the likely voter polls by bringing unlikely registered voters out.

With this, it's all about return on investment.

Spending time and resources to engage with people who are undecided won't move the needle because these people are already objects of obsession for presidential and senatorial campaigns.

They've been getting mailers, robocalls, phone calls and visitors for months. Sending over one more is more likely to annoy them than to win them. 

Even more, the campaigns think that anyone who is still undecided is actually pretty likely to just not vote. At that point, all the energy is useless.

That's why they're dumping every resource they have on the ground into making sure unlikely registered voters come out to the polls, and trusting the ads on the air and in the mail to deliver a decent portion of whichever undecideds actually show up.