Tuesday, December 25, 2012

2012 Voter Turnout in Swing States was much higher than elsewhere and so were the concentration of campaign ads

Which leads me to believe that the TV ads that were broadcast in those states may have played a part in getting out the vote and more importantly, the MESSAGE...unfortunately, Obama's message.

In my opinion, this is where team Romney blew it. Team Obama spent almost every penny they had running negative Romney ads in swing states beginning during the GOP Primary. Much of which went unanswered until after Romney was the nominee and could spend the GOP Presidential war chest. Unfortunately, the anti-Romney seeds were planted early in those states and with the help of the liberal media, Any time Romney began to fight back, the liberal media always found something to criticize Romney for to take from any attack he made on Obama. This was the media's MO throughout the campaign.

This special attention to swing states may have fed a perception to the non-swing state voters that their votes weren't that important. According to the Center for the Study of the American Electorate:
"Increasingly, people in non-swing states don't think their vote makes any difference," says Curtis Gans, director of the center. That seems to be costing non-battleground states some of the boost in voter participation that presidential contests traditionally bring.
The chart below shows the trend:

As recently as 1996, there was essentially no difference in turnout between the swing states and the other states plus the District of Columbia: 51.5% of eligible citizens in the battlegrounds voted; elsewhere, 51.4% did. In that campaign, the presidential candidates contested more states and their TV ads aired more broadly.
Differences in turnout have been steadily widening since then: 1.2 percentage points in 2000, 4.4 points in 2004 and 5.2 points in 2008. This year, 64.2% of eligible citizens went to the polls in the battlegrounds compared with 56.8% in the rest of the nation — a disparity of 7.4 points.
Read the whole story HERE.

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2 comments:

aj rabin said...

MN not Mo is the 12th swing state

Anonymous said...

You're wrong aj...Minnesota was never a swing state.