"Context on Battleground Spending" (538 explains how Obama is spending $ on Ground Operation not TV)

[mod mom]

Tuesday, August 19, 2008

Context on Battleground Spending

Let me start here. Talking Points Memo is, hands down, as good as it gets in political blogging/reporting. They are the gold standard. But last night, Greg Sargent at TPM's Election Central reported that John McCain was outspending Barack Obama in battleground states under this headline:

McCain Outspending Obama By Hundreds of Thousands in Many Core Battleground States

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What's wrong with this story's framing?

What's wrong is that when I read those headlines, I get the impression that McCain is massively outspending Obama in the core battleground states. No context is presented. While at least Martin has "On TV" in his headline, there isn't a single mention on either TPM or in the Politico blurb contextualizing that spending in a state is not just advertising.

Readers here know that Barack Obama is dwarfing John McCain's ground operation; we've written about it repeatedly. Those thousands of paid organizers are not working for free. The field offices and the phone lines and the Blackberries and the reimbursed travel miles are not free. Moreover, Barack Obama pays his organizers out of the Campaign for Change, which is funded by Obama's own campaign; McCain's are mostly paid by the coordinated committees which in turn are funded by the RNC, RNSC and RNCC, further impacting the way spending numbers are attributed to each campaign.

While millions may be spent on advertising, so too is one campaign spending millions on ground game while the other is spending virtually nothing. Obama is investing more massively than any campaign in the history of American politics on the ground game. McCain is essentially not investing in ground. His early summer numbers of 20,000 phone calls nationwide for a whole month would be those of a single, low-budget House campaign. That's the equivalent of one person working ten hours a day for a month. For the entire nation. It's basically the equivalent of zero contacts. When Martin writes that McCain's ground campaign is revving up, it's essentially starting from nothing and is now in 1st gear.

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http://www.fivethirtyeight.com/2008/08/context-on-battleground-spending.html