A variety of news stories, including this piece at Talking Points Memo, describe how the Romney camp is going forward with 15 new ads in 8 battleground states.
By now we know that the Republicans have pulled their advertising out of PA and MI. It is interesting that this buy does not include WI and its 10 electoral votes.
Let's presume for a moment that the Romney camp has given up on those 3 three states.
The states in which they are competing (with current electoral votes in parentheses) are as follows:
CO (9), NV (6), IA (6), FL (29), OH (18), NC (15), VA (13), NH (4).
Those 8 states total 100 electoral votes.
In 2008 Obama won 365 electoral votes. The states he won now have 359 electoral votes.
Obama will not carry IN with its 11 electoral votes, nor is he expected to carry the 2nd Congressional District in NE this time. Removing those 12 votes the baseline electoral vote count for Obama is 347.
In other words, if Obama wins all 8 states in which Romney is targeting his ads, he will still win 347 electoral votes.
If Romney were to carry all 8, he would have 291 electoral votes to Obama's 247.
In other words, Romney has a much narrower path to the 270 electoral votes necessary for election.
He can lose only 21 of those 100 contested electoral votes.
If he loses FL, the election is over.
If he loses OH and any other state, the election is over - and remember, internal Obama polls showed a 9 point margin BEFORE the Democratic convention
If he loses VA and CO the election is over.
If he loses CO, IA & NV the election would be tied 269-269.
You can run other scenarios on your own.
The state of the race, as demonstrated by Romney's advertising, indicates a landscape far more favorable to Obama than to Romney.
Yes, there will be hundreds of millions in ads dumped into those 8 states. Living as I do in Virginia I have already been seeing that. But at some point the advertising gets ignored because people begin mentally to turn it off.
I will be interested to see where the Obama campaign targets its advertising, even as I know their field organization remains superior in states like Virginia and Ohio.
What do you think?