Campaign Diaries

Karl Rove’s latest op-ed published in the Wall Street Journal provides some hard numbers as to how much Obama and McCain are spending on general election ads, something we haven’t yet gotten an exact idea of. He claims that Obama spent $4.3 million from June 20th to the end of the month, and has since then expanded his buy to spend $15 million in the space of two weeks. McCain’s spending, $2.1 million in one week, is paltry in comparison.

If Rove’s numbers are correct and Obama did indeed spend $15 million for the first two weeks of July, that would mean that (1) Obama had a great fundraising month in June and (2) the Democratic nominee will do the most of his financial edge and the GOP will have trouble staying afloat faced with Obama’s ad blitz.

McCain’s hope to compete with Obama financially? The RNC. The national party has a ton of money to spend to organize on the ground and to buy air time, and they are about to start using it! The RNC is getting ready to air its first ad, which will contrast McCain and Obama on energy issues. This is described as a significant buy in: Pennsylvania, Ohio, Wisconsin and Michigan. This tells us two things:

• What: The McCain campaign has emphasized energy conservation over the past 2 weeks, as it believes this is something on which it can differentiate himself from the Bush Administration and gain ground on Obama. That Republicans will air their first attack/contrast ad against th Democratic nominee on this issue confirms that we are likely to hear a lot about this in the coming months.

• Where: The list of states in which it will air is not very long. We have long known that the GOP is interested in playing it safe, duplicating the map of the Bush-Kerry contest and contesting a narrow slate of battlegrounds. But it is, very interestingly, an offensive list, as only one of these four states was won by Bush in 2004. The fact that Michigan would make it among the four states the GOP is most interested in is particularly instructive; it confirms that the state is much more vulnerable this year than it was in 2004.

Meanwhile, Barack Obama’s attempts to expand the map seem to be paying off. You might remember that Obama is airing his ads in 18 states, including traditionally Republican ones — North Dakota, Montana, Alaska, Indiana and Georgia. This sparked debate as to whether the Democrat’s campaign actually believes they can flip these states or whether they are just trying to put McCain on the defensive. A new Rasmussen poll from Montana provides an answer:

• Obama is ahead of McCain 48% to 43%, the inverse of the previous Rasmussen poll from the state.

This is obviously a stunner: Montana went for Bush by 20% in 2004, and even though the state’s Governor and two Senators are now Democrats, Montana is still considered a staunchly red state. Two institutes besides Rasmussen have tested the state (Research 2000 and SUSA) and they have both found a single-digit race, confirming that the state is in play, but for any poll to show Obama ahead shows that his investment is paying off, big-time. Sure, the state only has 3 electoral votes, but that’s not negligeable given how tight the past two elections have been.

More importantly, McCain will not be able to ignore polls showing him only up single-digits (let alone trailing) in states like Texas and Montana. If such numbers hold up, the Republican will have to give up airing ads in only a small number of battleground states and will need to spend money on such red states. Depending on his financial resources, that might require abandoning efforts in blue states like Oregon and Minnesota and allow the epicenter of the battle to move into Republican territory.

And we have already gotten the first sign that McCain is being forced on the defensive and is planning on investing in a state that he was not planning to campaign in: TPM reports that McCain has bought air time in four Virginia markets for an ad that will start airing next Tuesday. Given that it took the campaign this long to come around to recognize they need to seriously defend Virginia (the one state that was not competitive in 2004 that is now undoubteldy in play), will they wait too long to recognize potential dangers in states about which there is more debate (Alaska, North Carolina…)?