About 3% of Pennsylvania voters are still undecided. Here’s what we know about the group that could swing the race.

Chloe “Cherry” Lang, a 20-year-old retail worker from Norristown, first voted in 2022, inspired to support Democratic Gov. Josh Shapiro as abortion bans threatened reproductive rights in states across the country.

Now, Lang, who works two jobs at T-Mobile and Spencer’s as she tries to save money while living with her parents, is stuck on what to do in November. Frustrated with both major parties, she’s unsure whether she’ll vote at all.

“I’m trying to get my life together, but both presidential candidates don’t seem to be working for us rather than themselves,” Lang said. “My generation, we aren’t able to really afford to do anything, and I don’t think either candidate is gonna make that change.”

Lang is one of about 3% of Pennsylvania’s registered voters who are undecided about the 2024 presidential election — a small yet significant number in a state that could determine the presidency, and where past elections have moved based on tens of thousands of votes.

Undecided voters are often hard to study — they tend to be less engaged, or frustrated with both parties, which makes them more unlikely to respond to polls. And with a little more than two months until the election, a lot of them are just not paying attention yet. But the holdouts who do make up their minds in the final two weeks before Election Day can decide the winner in close states.

Here’s what we know about undecided voters in this critical state.

A recent Franklin and Marshall poll of registered Pennsylvania voters surveyed in mid-August found that about 3% were undecided and 8% supported someone else in the race. An Emerson College poll of likely voters from the end of this month found about 2% of respondents intended to vote but had not yet picked a candidate. An additional 1% supported someone else in the race.

That’s lower than in August 2020, when about 6% of likely Pennsylvania voters said they were undecided.

“Part of it is, I think, [former President Donald Trump’s] candidacy. People are pretty aware of Trump and to some extent, they are either voting for or against him,” Emerson College pollster Spencer Kimball said.

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But the unswayed group is still large enough to swing the race in Pennsylvania, where Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris are deadlocked in most recent polls and where the state was won by a little more than 1 percentage point in 2020 and a little less in 2016.

Factoring in voters who previously said they were backing a third-party or independent candidate, including Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who is no longer on the ballot in Pennsylvania, the number of undecided voters or those supporting a third option increases to about 10% in the F&M poll.

Third-party voters are a group to watch, as they often change their minds, said F&M pollster Berwood Yost. “It’s pretty normally the case that the candidates who are running as third-party candidates tend to poll better than they actually do on Election Day,” Yost said.

It’s unclear what, if any, impact Kennedy’s dropping out and endorsing Trump will have, but if Kennedy’s supporters follow his guidance, it could give Trump an edge in Pennsylvania.

Breaking the sample of undecided voters down further is an imperfect science, since in a poll of about 1,000 people, the group becomes a sample size of about 30. But generally, undecided voters in Pennsylvania are more likely to be registered unaffiliated with a party.

About three-quarters of them were independent voters in the Emerson College Pennsylvania poll. The remainder was split between the two major parties. In the Emerson poll, undecided voters skewed slightly toward having supported Trump in 2020, and they tended to be younger than the state’s overall average population.

“It’s the ones who just came into voting in the last couple of cycles and now they’re questioning what happened,” Kimball said.

F&M’s sample of undecided voters was also majority (60%) independent voters, and included more women than men.

Zooming out to look at Emerson’s poll across all seven swing states (a total sample of 107 people), Pennsylvania’s undecideds are somewhat older and whiter than in other states. Across all seven states, Black voters are more likely to be undecided (23%) compared to their proportion in the electorate, while Hispanic (11%) and white voters (58%) are less likely. Just 10% of voters age 60 or older were undecided, while indecision was higher among younger voters under 60.

The population of undecided voters across swing states, including Pennsylvania, has shifted somewhat from when President Joe Biden was the Democratic nominee, and it includes more younger voters, looking slightly more like the base Trump will seek to recapture.

“Before it was a group that the Democrats were going after, because they had a lot more of their voters sitting on the sideline,” Kimball said. “But they got them back in with Harris. Now it looks like a little more of the Trump vote that is undecided, and we’ll see if he can get them back.”

Again, the sample size is small, but of the 107 undecided voters across all seven swing states, 52% leaned toward Trump while 46% leaned toward Harris, when pushed to choose. Another 2% opted for neither candidate.

In 2020, these voters broke 43% for Trump, 37% for Biden, 11% for a third party, and 9% did not vote, according to the Emerson polls.

Yost, from F&M, noted in his poll that 10% of voters said they could still change their mind — another variable that could be determinative.

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In the coming weeks, expect to see both candidates trying to focus on turning out their base, while also campaigning for the often hard-to-pin-down middle.

“If you look at Harris’ strategy she seems to be trying to do both,” Yost said. “I think Trump seems to want to do both at times and then kind of gets off on a tangent.”

Mary Biser, a 74-year-old registered nurse from York, had been leaning toward voting for RFK Jr. until he removed himself from the ballot. A two-time Trump voter, Biser wasn’t sure she could stomach a third vote for Trump, whose policies she largely agreed with, but whose authoritarian tendencies she found unnerving.

“The things with Jan. 6, it’s hard to know who did what and how much he was involved, but that’s kind of scary to think about, that type of politics and trying to overthrow the government,” she said.

But Biser thinks Democrats “are showing socialist and communist-type behavior,” which she fears more. She said she had a discussion with similarly conflicted members of her church last week, and decided she’ll likely push the button for Trump.

“It’s a vote for the platform, not the candidate,” she said. “I don’t like him, but I dislike the Democrats more and I don’t think Harris has the brains or the experience.”

Meanwhile, Cynthia Wilson, 69, from Harrisburg and also a retired registered nurse, is also the kind of swing voter both campaigns hope to win over.

She’s a registered Republican who is voting Democratic in her congressional race and Republican in the state’s Senate race. She watched Harris’ interview on CNN Thursday considering whether she could support her, but was disappointed in a lack of specific answers to the questions.

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”She talks about a new future,” Wilson said. “What have we had the past 3½ years you’ve been vice president?”

But Wilson said Trump doesn’t give specifics, either, and said she was horrified at reports of his campaign filming and bullying staff while visiting Arlington National Cemetery last week.

”I honestly think these people, her and Trump, they really think the American people are stupid. It really offends me.”

If the election were today, Wilson said she and her husband would write in former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley’s name for president.

”We know it’s not gonna get us anywhere,” Wilson said. “But at least we can say we voted.”