Excessive Advertising?

Over the course of this election season, the Barack Obama and Mitt Romney campaigns are reported to have spent over $1 billion on political ads. In class we discussed the high proportion of persuasive campaigning in lieu of more informative campaigning. Persuasive campaigning attempts to get everyone in the distribution to vote for the candidate, rather than attempting to garner the vote of those near the candidate's position.

The article talks about how much the two candidates spent money on airtime and political advertising. The article notes that most of the advertisements have been shown in the same nine battleground states, and most focused on Florida, Ohio, and Virginia. This  observation seems to be in line with the idea that consumer-voters and campaigns would want to spend money in advertising in these areas, in order to sway voters across the spectrum of issues to vote for their candidate.

Also, sorry Virginia. According to CNN, " in an indication of how competitive Virginia is, both campaigns increased their ad spending there in the last 24 hours -- Romney now totals $3.6 million and Obama $3.3 million"

The increased advertising frequency in the battleground states in another example of wasted resources due to lobbying as well!