Cool information that puts this all in perspective. The numbers on the right indicate the amount of money that the Obama campaign is spending, relative to the McCain campaign, per every one hundred voters, in each state, on TV ads--Chris
When I read Chris' front-page post about the relative ad spending by McCain and Obama, I thought that it would be more useful if adjusted for the relative size of the states. So I did the math; my results and commentary are below.
A few observations. First of all, except for a few outliers, Obama's spending is tightly clustered from from about 20 to about 40 thousand dollars/100K residents. The figures are not broken down by media market, but I suspect that the Obama buy in West Virginia might be meant to target southern Ohio just as much as West Virginia itself, if not more so--it's not a state that's necessarily favorable to Obama specifically. On the one hand, primary results don't necessarily predict general election results; on the other hand, he got 26%. The other big outlier for Obama? Virginia, where's he's spending $50K for every 100,000 residents, almost 25% more than in his next-highest state (Florida, in a somewhat unconventional move).
For McCain, the biggest state by far is Nevada, with about $75K per 100,000 people. This is $33,000 more than Obama, the biggest margin for McCain in any state. Obama's margins, meanwhile, are usually higher than McCain's. He leads by $43K in Florida--where McCain has yet to spend anything at all--and by about $30K in Indiana and Georgia. Feints? Or states that he believes he can legitimately put in play? It'll definitely be worthwhile to revisit this chart in a few months once the air war has really heated up.
STATE BLOGS
