Chris Martin's blog

I'm still recovering from the the Iowa caucuses and the avalanche of ads in the final weeks. For the record, about $9 million was spent on TV ads in Iowa for the campaigns -- more than $100 for each caucus voter.

Some details and observations:

The ads were nearly all TV and direct mail -- little radio or newspaper.

The direct mail ads were much more harsh on competitors than TV ads.

The latest poll (Reuters/MSNBC/Zogby) now has an essentially four-way race. Given the margin of error (+ or - 4.5%), Kerry, Dean, Gephardt, and Edwards are tied at about 20% each.

But, the final Iowa caucus results probably won't be so close. Why? Because in each caucus meeting, a candidate needs to get support from at least 15% of the people in the room to be viable. If supporters of one or more of the four leading candidates don't amount to 15%, they typically need to throw their support to their next favorite candidate. (The polls would be much more useful if they also asked respondents who their next favorite candidate is--sort of an instant run-off poll.) As the Boston Globe said today, "caucus polls are notoriously unreliable."

Way back on Oct. 30, my New Hampshire pen pal James Farrell first talked about the awkward-sounding "I approved this message" taglines that candidates are now required to work into their broadcast ads.

I'm used to them by now, and I appreciate one by-product of this federal requirement: it seems to be cutting down on negative ads. As the New York Times mentioned yesterday (and NPR today), there is little negative TV advertising in Iowa. But, it's a whole different story on the direct mail side (which, as the Times reported, is hailing down on Iowans in record amounts. I can confirm this from my own mailbox experience).

TV ad time is being snatched up by the major candidates. With so many potential caucus-goers still undecided, the scene is quite frenzied and volatile in Iowa. Kerry is moving up in the polls, as is Edwards (who just got the coveted Des Moines Register endorsement).

The Lee Enterprises poll released today puts support for Dean at 23%, Gephardt at 18%, Kerry at 15%, Edwards at 9%, and Kucinich at 4% (margin of error plus or minus 4.9%, so things are very tight).

Upon my return from holidays out of Iowa, I was confronted by a backlog of automatic phone messages (thanks Edwards and Dean folk) and about 20 different mailings, most from Gephardt, but also Edwards, Kerry, and Dean.

Several of the new mailings demonstrate a significant theme of this Democratic field: all of the candidates' rhetoric is much less conservative than it was four years ago. (The exception is Lieberman, who is still campaigning like it's 1999 and has seen his ratings slip from one-time leader to also-ran.)

He hasn't endorsed anyone, but I believe that Saddam Hussein has just upstaged Al Gore as a factor in the current campaign season.

It's about 35 days until the Iowa Caucus, and the former dictator of Iraq has been caught.

There is a lot of talk about how this might affect the caucus and primaries, and the general election. (In the first week of December, I said anything can happen in the next 6-7 weeks, and it did. And I wouldn't be surprised at more surprises before the Iowa Caucus and NH Primary.)

Much has been made of Dean's high-tech campaign approach. Indeed, he has used the Internet to great advantage, building a campaign of volunteers (according to literature I received recently from the Dean campaign) of 480,000 people. Moreover, he reports that more than 200,000 Americans have contributed an average of $77 each to the Dean campaign.

That kind of grassroots giving is amazing at this point of the campaign, especially when one considers this: According to a Campaign Finance Institute study cited in USA Today on July 20, 2003, "only about 600,000 people contributed any amount to the 2000 presidential candidates. That's a third of 1% of the voting-age population." (According to the same article, big donors - classified as those who gave $750 or more -- accounted for 74% of Bush's funding and 65% of Gore's funding in the 2000 primary.)

Things have gotten even more interesting in the past few days. I continue to get direct mail from Dick Gephardt's campaign. One piece continues a common theme of Gephardt literature: quotes from news sources that keep repeating that Gephardt is the candidate GOP strategists most fear. (Dear blog readers and political insiders, is this true, or is this - as someone recently suggested to me - just GOP strategist disinformation to get people to endorse Gephardt, who Bush really thinks he could beat?)

The big national news on the campaign in the past week was John Kerry's firing of key campaign aides as he tried to breathe some life into his run for the Democratic nomination. Kerry also came out with a new ad on November 10th that portrays him as more active and less wooden than previous ads. ("Who can take on George Bush and change the direction of the nation? John Kerry," the ad begins.) But, whatever he might have gained by the new faces on the staff and the latest TV ad was lost in Kerry's Harley ride into Jay Leno's studio on November 11th.

The air in Iowa and New Hampshire is getting colder, which means the caucus and primary are getting closer, which means all of the candidates are getting sharper elbows as they try to race ahead of the others.

The first sign of this was the emergence of Dean's so-called negative ad a few weeks ago. His leading competitors (mainly Gephardt and Kerry) suggested he went "negative," and the news media dutifully reported it as such.