The Romney and Obama campaigns are already spending millions of dollars to attack each other on television. It’s a bit early for that, as Jeremy Peters pointed out in The Times today, and they’re battling for the attention of an incredibly tiny slice of voters.
“Since the beginning of April,” Mr. Peters wrote, “four-fifths of the ads that favored or opposed a presidential candidate have been in television markets of modest size.” The two sides are buying TV spots in relatively small cities, within states that claim very few electoral college votes, like Cedar Rapids and Des Moines in Iowa, which has six votes, and Colorado Springs and Grand Junction in Colorado, which has nine. They’ve spent $5 million since early April to run ads nearly 6,000 times just in and around Las Vegas. Nevada has six delegates, making the $5 million spree “the highest rate of spending per electoral vote anywhere by far.”
I draw three conclusions from this strategy.
First, if you live in Iowa or Colorado or Nevada, your TV-watching experience must be pretty dreary. It might be time to invest in a Netflix account.
Second, the campaigns’ polling must be showing them that most people have already made up their minds, or, if they haven’t, live in places so solidly red or so solidly blue that their votes can’t make a difference. They’re likely worried that this election will come down to rounding-error territory, meaning that states with small electoral college delegations will make a difference.
My third point relates to my second: The electoral college no longer makes sense. It distorted the 2000 election to the point where the national loser became the winner because of a few hanging chads in Florida. It’s an antiquated system that was intended to stop ordinary people from actually choosing the president. It has no place in modern politics.
A side note: As ridiculous as the spending levels are getting, the president and Mr. Romney probably won’t beat John Connally’s record for the amount of money thrown away on a single vote. In 1980, Mr. Connally spent $11 million in the G.O.P. nominating contest and secured one delegate to the national convention: Ada Mills, of Clarksville, Ark. In today’s dollars, that’s at least $30 million.