Many Ads in Search of the Few Undecided

To understand the early intensity of this year's presidential campaign, it's necessary to first understand this: Never has so much money been spent to chase so few voters. The two candidates, their parties and their supporters are hauling in record amounts of money to buy ads this cycle. But they're using that money to chase what both sides agree is an unusually small number of genuinely undecided voters. "It's probably, on the low end, 6%, and on the high end, 10%," said one top campaign operative. That's lower than four years ago, and means more than 90% of voters already are locked in. The campaigns are aiming a lot of firepower at a small group of targets. Why? To start with, the country is very polarized in general. It's split nearly evenly between the two parties, so the number of people wavering in the middle is small.