Whoa, this is big news:
The national Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee has purchased a large bloc of advertising time in the South Bend and Fort Wayne television markets for the final three weeks leading to Election Day. […]
Sources tell FWOb that $487,000 has been committed to television advertising by the DCCC in the Third District. That represents an approximately 1900 point buy which means even the most casual television viewer is likely to be exposed to the advertising numerous times.
The first ad is to begin running this morning. Advertising purchased by the congressional campaign committees tends to be more oriented to driving up the negatives of the incumbent than providing a positive message supporting the nominee.
That’s a significant amount of scrilla for this race. This is an R+16 district, but GOP incumbent Mark Souder has displayed some significant weakness as of late, and only beat back his 2006 opponent by a 54-46 margin — and that was after the NRCC spend several hundred grand to swamp out his Democratic opponent.
This time, Democrat Mike Montagano is running a well-funded race, and has been surging in his own internal polls since April. When polls close on election night, this race will be one of the first to post returns — and if things look good for Montagano here, you know this is going to be a huge night.
(Hat-tip: Blue Indiana)
UPDATE: The DCCC’s first ad of this race is available here:
too; it’s #11 among contested GOP-held districts according to the Bang for the buck index. That much money can pay for a pretty thorough blanketing.
hopefully the DCCC will take out a big (15 million?) dollar loan and do this in a lot of more “Expand the Map” districts. I’m thinking WY-AL, WV-02, VA-02, OH-02, NV-02 and VA-05. All close races in dirt cheap media markets that 500k could go a long way in.
This will be a difficult district to hold and if we lose the Governor’s race we’ll get screwed on redistricting, so normally I’d question the wisdom of this.
That said, we may as well attack on all fronts in Indiana and that R+16 is going to come down a lot now that Obama’s shown that there is some potential in Indiana for Democrats.
sucked. Started off promising with the “Washington changed Mark Souder”, but the examples it gave were piss poor. So he voted to give himself pay raises and went on junkets overseas. Is that the best they’ve got? Sheesh. How about hammering him on his actual VOTES? Did he vote for the GLBA that helped lead to the deregulation mess we’re in?