13 August 2008
Public theater
Posted by socialdecline under: Uncategorized .
Obama owns Florida airwaves
by Frank James
Florida, with its 27 electoral votes, is the fourth richest prize available to the presidential candidates, trailing only California, Texas and New York. Importantly, it is the only potential swing state among them.
Couple that knowledge with how fiendishly close the election was in 2000 and how only a few hundred Florida votes shifted history’s course and one would assume that Florida would be the place where both candidates would be currently waging the TV ad air war in earnest. But you would be wrong to assume that.
As The cialis kaufen Wall Street Journal reports, while Sen. Barack Obama has run thousands of local TV ads in Florida, 9,785 to be exact, McCain hasn’t run any local ads. Zilch. Zippo. Nada.
In Florida’s living rooms, the presidential contest so far has been a landslide — Barack Obama, 9,785; John McCain, zero.
That is the tally of local television commercials broadcast by each candidate in the state, whose 27 electoral votes Sen. McCain almost certainly needs to win the White House. Recent polls in Florida show Sen. McCain holding a small edge.The Obama campaign has spent about $6.5 million on TV advertising in Florida, according to the Campaign Media Analysis Group, a unit of media tracker TNS Media Intelligence. In part, the spending can be attributed to the Democrat’s late start there. He refrained from campaigning in Florida during the primary season after the Democratic Party penalized the state for holding its primary early.
A spokesman for Sen. McCain declined to discuss why the campaign hasn’t run TV ads in Florida, but said the Republican is investing heavily in the state and is doing well. “We’ve got offices across the state and a very robust operation,” said Jeff Sadosky. “That’s a state where we won a primary.”
Sen. McCain does get some exposure to Florida television viewers through national buys on NBC during the Olympics and on cable news channels.
The McCain campaign buy flomax must be super confident about its organization in Florida and in the polling it’s seeing from the Sunshine State to abstain so far from running a single local ad.
Sadosky, the campaign spokesman, makes an excellent point about McCain having campaigned in Florida last spring and winning.
But that ignores the almost 1.8 million Democrats who turned out to vote in the January 29 primary this year, even though none of their party’s presidential candidates campaigned in Florida as a result of the national party punishing the state after Florida moved its primary to an earlier, unsanctioned date.
That compared with 1.9 million Republican votes cast in a race in which the Republican candidates aggressively contested.
Still, Republicans’ public demeanor in Florida is apparently far from panicked whether the issue is the Obama-McCain local-TV-ad disparity or, as it turns out, in voter registration.
A story in today’s Orlando Sentinel reports that Democrats have registered more than 252,631 new voters this year in Florida compared with 98,354 registered by Republicans.
Republicans say they are unfazed by this, however. As the Sentinel reports:
Republican leaders responded that they have trailed Democrats in registered voters before and still won the election. Democrats held a 3.9 percent edge in 2000 when Al Gore lost the disputed presidential race by 537 votes. They also trailed Democrats heading into 2004, when George W. Bush beat John Kerry in Florida by 380,000 votes.
“The Democrats are focusing on registering anybody who has a heartbeat, regardless of whether the registered person has any intent to vote,” said Florida Republican Party Chairman Jim Greer.
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