According to Mueller section 20.3, "the number of votes a candidate receives is a function of her campaign expenditures, the expenditure of her opponent, and their positions on issues," and "the most difficult challenge to many new entrants into politics face is to get citizens to remember their names." Based on this, a candidate should spend money on campaigning in a way that is most effective given their stance on issues and their opponent's stance on issues, and in a way that will make voters remember them well. The article says "the hope is that the voters will remember why some of them flocked to the governor back in August: He's a plain spoken governor who says he created jobs."
So the question is whether or not Perry's spending on ads will erase voters' memories of the mistakes Perry made in his debate, and leave them with positive thoughts about the good things Perry could do in office. On the other hand, "Mitt Romney, the favorite to win the GOP nomination, has yet to spend a dime on paid media." Has Romney already reached the point that Mueller says a candidate aspires to reach, where "the candidate has raised enough funds to reach a point where the marginal return to the candidate in votes is zero."? If so, Romney should not waste money on spending if he cannot get positive marginal benefit, or votes, from campaign expenditures.
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I think it may be a bit premature to say that Romney has already reached the point where he “has raised enough funds to reach a point where the marginal return to the candidate in votes is zero.” Rather I think that Romney’s choice to forego television advertisements (and for that matter Rick Perry’s decision to invest heavily in television advertisements) has more to do with each candidate’s reputation among voters, or as Mueller might call it, their “brand name.”
Mueller uses an analogy that compares political candidates to corporations like Coca-Cola, saying that like corporations, candidates will advertise heavily at first to get their name and image ingrained in the consumers’ minds. But what happens (as we saw in Rick Perry’s case) when the image voters have in their mind about a given candidate becomes negative? In many ways this knocks the advertisement process back to its’ first stage, but instead of trying to create an image for voters to remember, it will attempt to alter the image of the candidate already held by voters. This is what Perry is doing right now.
Romney on the other hand, has not only been able to secure his own image and ingrain his name in the minds of voters without having to resort to television advertisements, but his image has been strengthened as his opponents continue to commit gaffes on camera that compromise their own images. It’s like what might happen to Coca-Cola if Pepsi committed a media gaffe; Coke wouldn’t have to do anything to reign in more consumers, they would get more consumers simply by virtue of the fact that people are less willing to buy Pepsi and there is a limited number of alternatives to choose from. Such is the case with Romney. Though he could almost certainly still gain voters by investing in television ads, voters are leaving Perry’s side in droves. And because Romney's name and positive image is already solidified in the minds of voters, he just has to sit back as voters now choose from a limited pool of alternatives, of which he is probably the strongest.
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