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Campaigns pick up the pace to meet schedule
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And given the time constraints, complicated by the fact that the three presidential debates are going to eat up campaign time in the weeks ahead, there is less time for a candidate to recover from a mistake or catch up should either Mr. Obama or Mr. McCain experience a major breakthrough at one of those debates.
“It fundamentally changes two things: timing and budgets,” said Mike DuHaime, the political director for Mr. McCain. “You need to close the deal earlier for some voters, and Election Day can be spread out over weeks. That means your get-out-the-vote costs are more than ever.”
David Plouffe, Mr. Obama’s campaign manager, said: “This is an enormously compressed time frame — this thing is really getting down to the wire. You can’t look at this like there’s 57 days until Election Day. We start having Election Day right around the corner.”
The shortened campaign season means that both campaigns have more money to spend on a per-week or per-day basis; thus, the $84 million that Mr. McCain is receiving in his federal campaign subsidy will go a lot further in a 60-day campaign than it would have gone in, say, 2000 when the general election campaign lasted 81 days.
Among shortest campaign season
With the exception of one campaign, 2004, this 60-day general election campaign is the shortest since the new Republican Party held its convention in 1856. This year, unlike 2004, the two parties held their conventions in consecutive weeks toward the end of the summer, making the general election that much more concentrated for both of them. Early voting is a relatively new phenomenon in American politics, and its influence varies widely by region. But significantly, Southwest states that have emerged as central McCain-Obama battlegrounds this year — Colorado, Nevada and New Mexico — are hotbeds of early voting, as is Florida, where one million people have already requested a ballot. But early voting is far less prevalent in contested Eastern states like New Hampshire, Pennsylvania and Virginia.
Paul Gronke, the director of the Early Voting Information Center at Reed College in Oregon, said he expected 33 percent of the votes in this presidential election to be cast early, a sharp increase from the 20 percent of the 2004 election. In the 2006 midterm elections, 25 percent of the votes were cast early.
“The numbers have accelerated as the campaigns have learned about this,” Mr. Gronke said. But, he said, this remains to some extent new territory, and he could see circumstances where early voting might not reach the levels expected.
“If the race is very competitive,” he said, “citizens may hold their ballots.”
Early evidence of how campaigns are adjusting to this new calendar can be seen in spending patterns on television advertising. Evan Tracey, the chief operating officer of Campaign Media Analysis Group, a company that monitors political advertising, said his campaign had charted a big upsurge in spending in Colorado, Iowa, Nevada and New Mexico in recent days. Those are all states viewed as big early-voting targets.
In addition, Mr. Tracey said, Mr. McCain went on the air on Sept. 1 in Florida, another state where early voting is viewed as crucial, after weeks in which he let Mr. Obama have the field to himself there.
Kitty Bennett and Jim Rutenberg contributed reporting.
This article, Campaigns Pick Up the Pace to Meet Tight Schedule, originally appeared in the New York Times.
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