While the consensus is that Mitt Romney stepped up as victor of the debate on Wednesday night, Obama has consistently outpaced the GOP candidate 3:1 in the battle for commercial ad space since April.
The Obama campaign has the distinct advantage of receiving discounted ad rates because it has "more funds in its coffers", a boon which The Washington Post describes in detail here.
According to US News, a Wesleyan Media Project analysis of Kantar Media data revealed that the president and his Super PAC paid for "10,000 more TV ads than Romney and the biggest conservative groups combined." In fact, the Obama campaign spent $164 million on ads since April, resulting in 35,000 commercials than the GOP has aired.
Travis Ridout, co-director of the Wesleyan Media Project, states: "Races aren't won solely by political ads, but if you run more ads than your opponent, that may buy you a percentage of the vote. Maybe that's why we're seeing Obama leading in the polls in so many of these swing states."
In terms of individual states, Ridout explains that "The campaigns won't show us internal polls, but if we see they're putting thousands of ads into Denver, we know they think Colorado is a really close state."
He adds, "[The campaigns] are concentrating their ad buys in fewer markets in fewer states than in 2008 especially. The poor people in basically eight swing states are just seeing a barrage of ads that the rest of the country isn't really seeing."
According to US Today, Florida, Colorado, Ohio, and Virginia received the most ad attention from both campaigns.
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