Air and Field with Budget constraints

By Fester:

Atrios snarks the following question:

Wasting Money On The Teevee

Doing that instead of focusing on GOTV efforts seems a bit odd to me.  Maybe it's just a maverick thing!

This is in reference to the McCain campaign spending their last marginal dollars on television ads instead of an extensive field push this weekend.

It actually is a fairly rational and reasonable decision for the McCain campaign to make as a field program thrown together in six weeks will be expensive and ineffective.  It takes time to ID hard supporters, it takes time to ID soft supporters, it takes time to persuade the undecided and weak opposition supporters, it takes time to make a good four or five touches on your persuasion and mobilization universes.  And if you don't do all of these things and do them well, your field operations won't be that effective no matter how much money is shoveled at the problem with four days to go. 

Sean Quinn at 538 documented his observations of the Obama and McCain field campaigns over the past couple of months.  Obama's offices were filled and busy in every state.  Most McCain offices did not have enough people to play cribbage. 

I went by the East Liberty Obama office this afternoon and there were twenty five to thirty volunteers prepping for the weekend.  They were cutting turf, building packets, stuffing bags, making phone calls and coloring in signs.  They are building off of eight months worth of work and they'll be able to mobilize a couple hundred volunteers for the GOTV weekend.  Their efforts could see a useful expansion of effectiveness if there is a money dump but that is only because there has been eight months of voter contacts. 

So if the McCain ground campaign was not there in July, not there in August, showed up for a couple of weeks to go moose hunting after Gov. Palin was nominated, and then went back home for October, dumping several million dollars into GOTV won't do shit for him.  It is a waste of money.  TV ads have a miniscule chance of being a game and race changer, so it is rational for McCain to spend his marginal dollars there given past campaign decisions and failures.

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