Obama launches advertising spree in swing states after drop in polls

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/may/07/obama-launches-swing-state-advertising

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The Obama campaign is to spend $25m on advertising over the next month in nine key swing states, making its first serious dip into the media market in support of the president's bid for re-election in November.

On the day that a poll in the swing states showed the president's nine-point lead over Mitt Romney evaporate since March, the Democrats released an ad touting Obama's record in office.

The campaign team promised more ads will follow over the next few weeks, some targeted specifically at local issues in each swing state.

Obama's chief strategist, David Axelrod, in a conference call with reporters, put a positive spin on the USA Today/Gallup poll. He picked out the gap between Obama and Romney in terms of enthusiasm among their respective supporters. The poll showed more Obama supporters enthusiastic about voting, a switch from late last year when there more Republicans had been enthusiastic about voting.

Axelrod attributed the lack of enthusiasm on the Romney side to the "grinding" negativity in the way he had fought his campaign against his Republican opponents.

The USA/Gallup poll, the first the organisations have conducted since Romney emerged as the clear challenger to Obama, puts Obama on 45% to Romney's 47% in what they identified as 12 swing states: Colorado, Florida, Iowa, Michigan, Nevada, New Hampshire, New Mexico, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Virginia and Wisconsin.

The Obama campaign is focusing its advertising on nine swing states, leaving out New Mexico, Michigan and Wisconsin.

Axelrod said the Obama re-election campaign was fighting on a positive note, its initial advert highlighting the president's record, laying the foundation for the campaign ahead, with no mention of Romney. New ads would follow, some of them tailored to each swing state.

Axelrod noted that the bulk of Romney's ads during the Republican primaries and caucuses had been negative. Anticipating a huge wave of negative ads from Romney-supporting Super Pacs, Axelrod said the Obama campaign would respond vigorously and would treat any ads from the Super Pacs as if they had come from the Romney campaign itself. In theory, the Super Pacs are separate from the campaign teams, though in reality the distinction barely exists.

Obama's new ad touts what his campaign claims is success in rescuing the economy, in particular the car industry, and his foreign policy achievements, in particular ending the war in Iraq and the killing of Osama bin Laden. Night-vision footage of the raid on the latter's compound is accompanied by a narrator saying: "Our greatest enemy brought to justice by our greatest heroes."

The ad claims 4.2m jobs have been created, adding: "We're not there yet, it's still too hard for too many. But we're coming back."

The Obama campaign team has been spending money since at least the middle of last year but much of that has been on staff rather than advertising. The head of Obama's campaign team, Jim Messina, also on the conference calls, said it was building one of the biggest grassroots organisations in US history in the swing states. He added that the Obama campaign team had not seen any corresponding build-up of field staff by the Romney campaign.