In the third and final presidential debate, Republican Donald Trump’s refusal to say he would accept the results of the election was the last straw for at least some voters who had been struggling with their decision.
Bijan Sharifi, a 34-year-old high-school teacher, said he was horrified by Mr. Trump’s comment during the debate that “I will tell you at the time” whether he would abide by the election’s outcome. Mr. Trump has been warning for months about a “rigged election” and has stepped up those allegations recently as he has slipped in the polls.
“I just saw a constitutional crisis on television,” said Mr. Sharifi, who said he intends to vote for Libertarian candidate Gary Johnson. “That was mind-blowing. I’m afraid there’s going to be terrorism and extremism after the election, and I don’t think Hillary Clinton is the leader who will unify the country.”
Lori Long, a retired paper-mill worker in Clarkston, Wash., tuned into the final presidential debate hoping to give Mr. Trump one last shot.
Ms. Long, who voted for Republicans John McCain in 2008 and Mitt Romney in 2012, said that she could never cast a ballot for Mrs. Clinton, the Democratic nominee, but that Mr. Trump’s remarks about potentially not accepting the results of the election, as well as about his treatment of women, turned her off for good.
“If I had to vote tomorrow, it still wouldn’t be for either one of them,” Ms. Long said. “I am so against her it’s just unbelievable. But I looked at him, and he opened his mouth, and that’s enough to stop me right there. Would I want him as my president? God no, I wouldn’t.”
Twenty days before the election, with two of the most unpopular presidential nominees in history, some voters were unsure of what to do, even after watching the final debate.
The debate brought Rick Saucier, a real-estate broker in Orlando, Fla., one step closer to a decision. He ruled out Mrs. Clinton once and for all, because of what he said was her non-response to a question about the emails hacked by WikiLeaks from her campaign manager’s private account. “If I’ve made up my mind, it’s about despising Hillary Clinton,” said Mr. Saucier, who voted for the last two Republican nominees. “I think so little of her. She doesn’t answer questions.”
Some voters, turned off by the vitriolic tone of the first two presidential debates, tuned out of the third one entirely.
“I’m not voting for either of those candidates anyway, and I just figure it’s just going to be more of the same nonsense,” said Garrett Thacker, 30, who works at a car dealership in Galloway, Ohio. He said he plans to cast a ballot for independent candidate Evan McMullin.
Ben Robinson, 33, a project manager for a custom home builder in Houston, also avoided the final presidential debate. He has settled on the Libertarian, Mr. Johnson. “I just really don’t care about what either of them has to say anymore,” he said.
“If I had to choose, I guess I would rather end up getting stuck with Hillary,” he added. “I disagree with just about everything she says, but that’s politics. Trump—he’s just dangerous.”
So who are the undecided voters in America?
About 8% of the electorate declined to choose either nominee or a third-party candidate in the latest Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll. Most of them prefer a Republican-controlled Congress, suggesting they lean Republican but can’t abide Mr. Trump. They also tend to be female and younger.
One development that may help Mrs. Clinton in the homestretch of the race is that she has improved her public image among the voters, while Mr. Trump hasn’t.
Through most of the year, Mr. Trump and Mrs. Clinton have had the distinction of being the least-liked major-party nominees in modern history.
That’s still true of Mr. Trump. Negative views of Mr. Trump outweighed positive ones by 33 percentage points in this week’s Journal/NBC News poll, about the same as in other recent surveys.
For Mrs. Clinton, negative views outweighed positive ones by 10 percentage points in the poll released this week. That’s an improvement from April, when negative views of Mrs. Clinton outweighed positive ones by 24 points.
The change leaves George H.W. Bush as the most unfavorably viewed nominee in recent history, after Mr. Trump.
—Aaron Zitner
contributed to this article.
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number of undecided voters 2016
