World Series

People in the business like to say politics is a sport, but this is unbelievable. 

According to Ira Teinowitz in Advertsing Age:

Major League Baseball has moved back the scheduled start time of any game 6 of the World Series so Fox can also air the half hour Barack Obama spot on Oct. 29.

A network spokeswoman confirmed the buy and said MLB had agreed to the network's request for the delay.

Fox now joins CBS and NBC in airing the half hour program, whose content the Obama campaign has declined to describe. The decision means that the Obama campaign is now spending close to $3 million to air the program from 8 to 8:30 p.m. that night on at least three networks. ABC didn't immediately return a message asking whether it too has now agreed to a buy, a move which would create an unprecedented roadblock of the nation's biggest commercial networks.

The fact that Obama has possibly altered the World Series series schedule is only slightly more unprecedented than the fact that his campaign has millions to spare to air whatever it wants for 30 minutes on three (maybe four) networks just days before the election. It is a political dream come true, fueled by the Illinois senator's seeming ability to raise unlimited amounts of money.

Last weekend, I wrote about Evan Tracey's analysis of Obama's TV spending habits and the stunning news that Obama had run 25,000 commericals in the previous four days alone.

Obama's dominance of the airwaves has only increased since that time. According to today's "The Fix" by Chris Cillizza in the Washington Post:

Amid speculation that Barack Obama could raise more than $100 million in the closing two months of the campaign, the Illinois senator continued to outspend John McCain drastically on television over the last week in a series of battleground states.

Reports obtained by The Fix detailing spending by the two campaigns as well as the Republican National Committee show that Obama dropped more than $32 million on television in 17 battleground states between Oct. 7 and Oct. 13 -- an increase of $12 million over what he spent between Sept. 30 and Oct. 6.

During that same time period, McCain spent approximately $10 million on ads in 14 states (the Arizona senator is not on television in Indiana, Michigan or Montana) while the RNC's independent expenditure effort disbursed $6 million more in eight states.

All told, Obama outspent McCain on television last week at a better than three to one rate while he outpaced the combined spending of McCain and the RNC by approximately a two to one margin.

What does this mean for U.S. Sen. John McCain? The picture doesn't look good. Says Cillizza: 

More problematic for McCain than the spending disparity is the fact that Obama is dramatically upping his spending in a series of red states -- evidence that he is almost entirely on offense with just three weeks left before election day.

In Florida, for example, Obama is now spending just shy of $5 million a week on television -- a $1.8 million (!) increase from just a week ago. The same pattern is apparent in Indiana (a $900,000 increase in ad spending over the past week), Missouri ($1.4 million increase) and Virginia ($2.3 million increase).

McCain, too, has upped his buys considerably over the last week but the majority of his increased spending is in states Republicans carried with ease in recent presidential election. He bumped up his buy by more than $700,000 in North Carolina (a state President Bush won with 56 percent in 2004) and more than $600,000 in Missouri (Bush 53 percent).

Obama's decision -- announced on June 19 -- to make history as the first presidential candidate to forgo public financing for the general election has born considerable fruit in the months since he made it.

The virtually unlimited fundraising potential Obama has demonstrated since that decision has allowed him to make good on a pledge to alter the traditional red state/blue state divide and force McCain to spend his much more limited resources on defense rather than offense.

While Obama is now seriously competitive in a number of states President Bush carried in 2000 and 2004 -- Virginia, North Carolina, Missouri, Montana, Indiana, Ohio, etc. -- McCain has extremely limited opportunities to flip states Sen. John Kerry won in 2004.

In other words, Obama's fundraising edge has served a dual purpose: it has forced McCain to fight for ground that Republicans thought they would never have to worry about this close to the election AND it has narrowed McCain's pickup opportunities to New Hampshire, Maine, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania.

As we have written before, spending is not conclusive when it comes to determining the outcome of the election -- now just 20 days away. But, in an election where the playing field is so heavily tilted in the favor of Democrats, Obama's spending edge in crucial states makes McCain's task that much harder.

Focusing on the broadcast battle in Northern Virginia, among others, Politico's Jeanne Cumming's weighed in today as well.

Again, look at Virginia, a state that hasn’t backed a Democratic candidate since 1964 and is now considered a tossup.

During the heated primary with Hillary Rodham Clinton, Obama spent $1.5 million in the Old Dominion. McCain, who was cruising to the nomination and had little money at that point in the GOP primary, spent just $330,000 on ads.

Since the Democratic primary ended in June, Obama has spent another $13 million in Virginia, compared with McCain’s $5.5 million, CMAG found.

Obama’s buying power allows him to run a mix of positive and negative ads and to spread them over a wider swath of turf. He is also able to play in all media markets, expensive or not. That’s a luxury McCain can’t afford, as evidenced by his near-blackout in Northern Virginia.

"McCain is virtually invisible in the commercial breaks,” said Bill Lord, vice president of news for WJLA-TV, the Washington ABC affiliate that is owned by Politico parent company Allbritton Communications Co.

To stay competitive in Virginia and elsewhere, McCain has made a series of ad buys in smaller markets or those that can provide a two-fer by bleeding into more than one state.

NDN has long argued that the power of broadcast has declined in the age of the Internet and other new media and tools, but there is no denying the massive power of this medium -- if you have the money to put behind your message.