I think expanding the map to Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Minnesota at this late date is brilliant. Obama’s voting blocks are not as reliable and need a major and expensive GOTV effort to vote early, to make up the difference in reliability and enthusiasm. Since these were considered “safe” blue state, I doubt that Obama invested a lot in those states for such an effort. While Romney can saturate the airwaves in the last week of the election in those states (his most potent weapon), Obama’s most potent weapon of GOTV for early votes cannot be deployed so suddenly in the last week of the election. Our Mitt is quite a chess player!
Romney’s early voting strategy, encouraging the low-intensity (less-likely-to-vote) people first, is really interesting. At first, it feels like it goes against the common sense (remember when we took tests, they always told us to do the easy ones first?). But, unlike tests, they actually have quite a lot of time to work on these low-intensity people since the ‘easy ones’ are guaranteed to be there on Tuesday. If it’s working, and Gallup says it is, the payoffs will be bigger than the traditional strategy (encouraging the die-hard fans first), I think, as it’ll generate more voters for RR.
Sandy changes ALL of this. Obama will simply stop campaigning until Nov. 6th, and Romney will be attacked by the media if he runs a single attack ad against him. Mitt needs to ignore this and continue pummeling the Usurper. Screw the food drives and Red Cross nonsense. NO ONE will be talking about Sandy six months from now, but if Obama wins America will be crippled for generations. Don’t get soft now, Mitt!