Does anyone seriously think this is the level of thought being applied by these undecided voters?

No. And none of them should be engaged in that level of thought. Any rational voter is just going to use heuristics to get them to a "close enough" answer on which candidate is going to be the one that they should vote for. The odds of them changing the outcome of an election - especially a statewide or federal election - are so low that it just doesn't make sense to get into the weeds too much. Unless you enjoy the weeds, which we political junkies do.

So for most people, it's not worth trying to figure out a massive list of the candidates' positions. Or which proposals might make it through Congress. Or the minutiae of whether their health care plan has a mandate or not. Etc. They need a super top-level sense of where this candidate is coming from - what "team" are they on, what motivates them, what is their general "deal" as a politician, what do they care about. Because if you show me what you care about, what's important to you, then I know more about you than looking at positions guides over on Ballotpedia (or wherever).

That's why I keep bringing up priorities. On economics, Trump's a right-wing economic populist. Everything he says screams that viewpoint. So when he keeps banging on about tariffs and ripping up the global trade playbook so that we can beat China, you get a good sense of where he's coming from. It's dumb and stupid, and mercantilist policies generally don't make countries better off - but it has the virtue of being solidly communicated to voters.

There's little for Harris that voters can use as a heuristic like that. We know she's deeply passionate about abortion - she's really hit that message, and she's energized when she talks about it. Great - when a voter knows that, it serves as a strong heuristic for a lot of other social issues.

But I think she lacks something similar for economic issues. Voters don't have a good heuristic for that - a single fact that they know about Harris that's enough for them to get a "probably wrong in detail but close enough" sense of what her economic policy will be.

And that's not great. I think enough voters are uncomfortable not knowing which part of the Democratic economic tradition she's roughly aligned with. A huge part of that is that she was Veep - during the last 3.7 years, and even now to some extent, she's had to exactly be in the Biden slice of that Democratic economic tradition - 100%. But if she's President? I couldn't tell you what she most wants to do.