If you live in a battleground state, you may have noticed that Bush, Kerry, and the 527s are engaging in a bit of an ad war, desperately trying to get (and keep) your attention. The Bush campaign, in particular, has been spending wildly in its own version of “shock and awe” campaign style, hoping to overwhelm Kerry with a massive ad buy that would push the polls in his direction.
It clearly hasn’t been working. As the LA Times noted yesterday:
President Bush and his Democratic foes have spent more than $48 million on television commercials since early March, a new independent estimate shows, but the unusually early advertising blitz doesn’t appear to have shifted the dynamics of the race in targeted states.
Data compiled for The Times by an independent ad monitor show that Bush has spent more than $26.6 million on broadcast and cable TV ads since the general election campaign kicked into gear. The conservative estimate was based on ads observed from March 4 through Saturday in major broadcast markets and on selected cable channels.
All told, Kerry’s campaign has only spent $6.1 million, less than a fourth of the money Bush has spent. And what’s happened in the polls? Not a whole lot. The polls taken just before March 4 showed Kerry with a small lead over Bush nationally. Six weeks and $48 million later, polls taken late last week show — you guessed it — Kerry with a small lead over Bush nationally.
Unfortunately, Bush’s campaign officials read the same reports I do. As a result, I’m afraid I have some bad news to share: BC04 has figured out that their awful ads aren’t working and they’re scaling back advertising dramatically.
This is quite a shame. Bush has built up an enormous campaign war chest, but he was spending wildly. The campaign may not have realized it at the time, but they were doing Kerry a huge favor. If Bush wanted to spend over $26 million on ineffectual ads that gave him virtually no boost in the polls, great. Kerry was more than happy to sit back and watch with some amusement.
Alas, our fun appears to have come to an end. As the LA Times wrote in a follow-up piece to yesterday’s article:
Despite its unprecedented fundraising success, President Bush’s reelection team is scaling back its massive level of television advertising, according to senior Republicans familiar with the campaign’s planning.
In the next few weeks, viewers in the 18 states where the ads have aired since early March will see about 30% fewer a week, one ranking GOP strategist said.
There are a variety of explanations as to why Bush’s ads were such an expensive failure — a garbled message, harsh tone, deceptive accusations, and the difficulty in competing with reality that showed Bush’s policies not working — but if this was an ad war, Bush blinked.
Pointing to recent polls that generally show Kerry at least even with the president, these Democrats say the Massachusetts senator has taken what could be the Bush campaign’s hardest punch and is still standing.
The reelection team spent so much so soon “with the intent of putting this thing away early, and it didn’t happen,” said Erik Smith, executive director of the Media Fund, a group formed by leading Democrats that is running ads in support of Kerry.
Independent analysts agreed with that assessment.
Anthony Corrado, an expert on campaign finance at Colby College in Maine, said that since March 4 — just after Kerry in effect wrapped up his party’s nomination — Bush has bought about as much television advertising as past presidential candidates purchased for the entire general election campaign.
“And frankly,” Corrado said, the president’s campaign “didn’t move the [poll] numbers that much.”
He added: “The Bush campaign came out heavy, both in terms of volume and with some of their strongest attacks, and they didn’t get a knockout.”