Storm of Ads Continues to Hit Swing-States As Campaigns Are Re-Focused

Only three weeks are left until election day, and President George W. Bush and Senator John Kerry's campaigns, as well as their supporters, are feeling the pressure. According to an Associated Press article, "Campaign Ad War Focused on 14 States,", featured on Salon.com, both Bush's campaign and Kerry's campaign have narrowed the TV ad playing field to include solely swing-states. As the AP article highlights, the Democratic Party has altogether stopped advertising in Missouri, where polls indicate strong support for Bush, and in North Carolina, where a history of conservatism has overshadowed the fact that the state's own Senator is running as Kerry's Vice President. Likewise, Bush's camp has reduced the number of ads it is showing in Washington State, which went to Democrat Al Gore in the 2002 Presidential Election, to next to nothing. Thus, fourteen swing-states, including Florida, Ohio, New Mexico and Nevada, remain targets for campaign ads from both the Democratic and Republican parties, as well as the interest groups that support them.
While both Bush and Kerry's campaigns are narrowing their focuses on just over a dozen swing-states, the groups' target audiences remain unique. As Taegan Goddard notes in an October 12 posting on his liberal leaning blog, Political Wire, Kerry's camp is hoping to reach undecided, middle-class viewers, while Bush's supporters are looking to its "party's faithful" conservatives. According to writer Nick Anderson of the LA Times in his October 12 article, Bush has spent far greater amounts of money on TV ads for national cable channels, whereas Kerry has funded more TV ads for local networks in swing-states. Anderson explains

national cable ads helped Bush project a uniform message throughout the 50 states and influence news coverage nationwide. But the state-specific ads...helped Kerry connect with TV viewers who had been bombarded by political commercials in places such as Philadelphia and Miami.

Now that battle-lines have been drawn and millions of dollars from the Democratic and Republican parties are being poured into national and local networks, questions concerning the affect and influence of political ads are being raised. The Wisconsin Advertising Project, a program set up by the University of Wisconsin to track and analyze the effect that political advertisements have on voting behavior, is attempting to shed some light on these difficult questions. In a press release from October 12, WiscAds reveals in its findings that candidates produce far more positive TV ads than their supporting groups, and that Democrats have covered a greater variety of issues in their TV ads.
While the Wisconsin Advertising Project has yet to release research specifically concerning the influence of TV campaign ads on viewers, panels and interviews that have been completed on Ohioans in the last month show that ads have no sizeable affects on individuals' votes. Research carried out by USA Today that was featured on Cincinnati's local channel 5 news station, an affiliate of ABC, showed that one in fifteen ads may have affect the ideological preference of a viewer. An October 11 Washington Post article, "Toledo Tube War: 14,273 Ads and Counting," highlights similar findings. In his article, writer Paul Farhi looks to Toledo, Ohio-"the most advertised-to market of any in the big battleground states." According to Farhi, despite the fact that campaign advertisements have offered an 8 million dollar boost to Toledo's economy, Ohioans are predominently irritated and turned off by the bombardment of ads that fills both cable and local TV stations. As of yet, the only visible benefit of Bush and Kerry's campaign ads seems to be the boost it may give to swing-state economies.