RICHMOND, Va. — People who live in Colorado and other battleground states tend to have a number and a coping strategy.
Virginian Catherine Caughey’s number is four: Her family recently got four political phone calls in the space of five minutes.
Ohioan Charles Montague’s coping mechanism is his TV remote. He pushes the mute button whenever a campaign ad comes on.
All the attention that the presidential campaigns are funneling into a small number of hard-fought states comes at a personal price for many voters.
The phone rings during a favorite TV show. Traffic snarls when a candidate comes to town. A campaign volunteer turns up on the doorstep during dinner. Bills get buried in a stack of campaign fliers. TV ads spew out mostly negative vibes.
The effects are cumulative.
“It’s just too much,” says Carmen Medina, of Chester, Va. “It’s becoming a little too overwhelming.”
Medina, it should be noted, is an enthusiastic supporter of Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney. She squealed with joy outside the United Latino Market in Richmond when she learned that Romney had just appeared at a rally across the street.
But she’s starting to block phone numbers to Make. The. Calls. Stop.
With the campaign now focused on just nine states — Colorado, Florida, Iowa, Nevada, New Hampshire, North Carolina, Ohio, Virginia and Wisconsin — the parties are able to target their resources narrowly.
Republicans say they’ve made three times more phone calls and 23 times more door knocks in Ohio than they had by this time in 2008, for example, and nearly six times more phones calls and 11 times more door knocks in Virginia. Democrats don’t give out that level of detail, but describe ambitious outreach activities from their 60-plus field offices in Virginia and 125 in Ohio.
The campaigns and independent groups supporting them are expected to pour about $1.1 billion into TV ads this year, the vast majority of it in the most competitive states.
Clearly, more exposure doesn’t always translate into more support.
“The more I see Romney, the less I like,” says Kay Martin, who lives in the Denver suburb of Arvada.
And if not generating a backlash, some of that political activity is surely just wasted energy.
Gwynnen Chervenic, in Alexandria, has taught her kids to yell “lies” any time a political ad comes on.
“I’m trying to make sure they develop a healthy skepticism about the election PR process,” she explains. “Makes me laugh every time and should help ease the pain until Election Day.”
John Geer, a political science professor at Vanderbilt University, says it’s the political equivalent of an arms race, and neither side dares stop the carpet bombing.
“We don’t know exactly where saturation occurs, but I think we’re way past that,” he says.
