It’s tough-choice time in the presidential campaign. John McCain has to make some. Barack Obama has 150 million reasons not to.
Obama’s record fundraising total for September gives him a luxury that Al Gore, John Kerry and even George W. Bush could only dream of: He doesn’t have to pull resources from one battleground state to compete harder in another.
Kerry gave up on Missouri in September 2004. A month later, Bush scaled back efforts in Maine and Oregon. Gore yanked his Ohio ads late in 2000 to concentrate on Florida. McCain has stopped airing ads in Michigan and other Democratic-leaning targets.
Money drove those decisions. But Obama is swimming in campaign cash. It’s a big reason he’s still playing in states other candidates might have abandoned months ago — and why his campaign is set to expand its target list, not shrink it, in the final run-up to Election Day.
“They can be much more aggressive in more states,” says Anthony Corrado, a government professor at Colby College who has written extensively about campaign finance. “Obama may not plan to win some of those states, but it keeps the pressure on McCain.”
Florida is a prime example. Obama never campaigned here during the primaries, amid a controversy over the state moving its election date up to late January. The state that decided the 2000 election appeared in early summer to be a sliding off the battleground bubble. Obama spent heavily on a sustained ad campaign anyway, and he opened four times as many field offices as Kerry did in ’04.
Now polls show Obama leading here slightly. On Monday he promised foreclosure relief in Tampa and joined former Democratic opponent Hillary Clinton for a rally in Orlando.
Obama also has spent big on the ground and the airwaves in the longtime GOP strongholds of Virginia, Indiana and North Carolina.
McCain accepted $84 million in public financing, and, per tradition, has winnowed his targets as November approaches. He spent Monday traveling throughout Missouri, where he took a dig at Democratic vice presidential candidate Joe Biden’s prediction over the weekend that an early “international crisis” would test Obama as president.
“We don’t want a president who invites testing from the world at a time when our economy is in crisis and Americans are already fighting in two wars,” McCain said.
McCain’s campaign greeted Obama’s $150 million September haul with awe and derision.
Obama “will no question go down in political history, regardless of the outcome of the election, as the greatest fundraiser in political history,” McCain campaign manager Rick Davis said. He questioned why Obama has not disclosed the names of people who gave him $200 or less — suggesting that Obama is collecting contributions from foreigners, which is illegal.
Both campaigns are blanketing a similar collection of key states with ads and get-out-the vote efforts. The big difference is scope.
From a survey of media reports, Corrado says Obama has 83 field offices in Pennsylvania and McCain 30. In Ohio, Obama has 76 while McCain has 45. In North Carolina, Obama has 47 to McCain’s 20.
McCain is advertising in 14 states; Obama, 15. (Michigan is the difference.) But in those states, Obama is outspending his rival about 3-1 on ads.
“In the past, Democrats have been overwhelmed by the Republicans’ spending, and it put us in a bad position in responding to attacks and getting our message out,” said David Axelrod, Obama’s senior strategist. “Now we have the advantage of being able to respond, and to do it over a broad battlefield.”
But how much does it matter? Obama leads in national polls and many battleground states, yet McCain remains within striking distance. Corrado said that is largely because America remains divided on party lines. Axelrod and Davis agreed.
“The lack of money in Wall Street had more to do with the outcome of this election in the last month,” Davis said, “than the money in Barack Obama’s bank account.”
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cparsons@tribune.com
jtankersley@tribune.com
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