Presidential ad campaign

One of the curiosities of the current Presidential campaign is how each side is chosing to allocate its resources. The chart at the right shows the number of ads on major cable-TV channels between January and June, 2004 (source: Nielsen Media Research and WSJ Reseach; linked from here).

Here is the Journal's take on this data:

President Bush is spending heavily on cable-television advertising in his bid to win re-election, and if the channels he is dropping dollars on are any indication, he is particularly concerned about voters he should already have in the bag.

Through the first six months of this year, Mr. Bush's campaign bought almost 3,100 ads on cable, mostly on channels that attract white male viewers, many of them affluent.

Interestingly, The Golf Channel (400 Bush ads and second only to MSNBC in total number of ads) has such a small viewing audience it doesn't even bother to subscribe to Nielsen to get viewer ratings. The channel claims that about two-thirds of its audience between 35 and 64 have household incomes over $100,000 per year. The channel watched by a few, wealthy, golf-playing males wouldn't seem like your typical Republican target for lots of campaign investment.

This spending pattern is a marked departure from the 2000 campaign:

Four years ago, Nielsen research shows that the Bush-Cheney committee didn't buy any time on the cable-news networks, and the Gore-Lieberman campaign bought just 12 spots.

Does the Republican campaign know something others don't? The Journal speculates on the riskiness of this cable-TV strategy. The election is supposed to be decided by the "swing voters," those who are undecided at this point. How sizeable is this group?:

about 10% of the electorate -- in about a dozen swing states. Who these on-the-fence citizens are and what they watch are matters of debate. But if Mr. Bush is using cable largely to shore up his base, isn't he risking wasting money preaching to the converted?

More discussion here.