More Than $100 Million In Attack Ads Fails To Move Voters

After spending more than $100 million airing mostly negative ads in the last three months, President Barack Obama and Republican challenger Mitt Romney and their allies haven’t been able to move the public-opinion needle in the states most likely to determine the general election.

In seven battleground states the candidates are either statistically tied or Obama holds a slight advantage, polls show. The deadlock comes as the campaign moves into a more critical phase that includes the presumptive Republican nominee’s foreign trip and running-mate selection and the two national conventions in late August and early September. The Obama campaign ran more than 136,000 spots in his top seven battleground states during the past 90 days, according to a Bloomberg News analysis of data from New York-based Kantar Media’s CMAG, a company that tracks advertising. The Romney campaign ran almost 60,000 ads in those states during that period. Three Republican groups backing his candidacy leveled the field some by airing 55,136 commercials attacking the president, while a pro-Obama group ran 11,377 ads. Still, the blitz isn’t persuading voters in part because so few of them -- about 5 percent in most surveys -- are undecided. “These guys are not worrying about efficiency,” said Ken Goldstein, CMAG’s president. “It is a blunt club and it is going to have very small effects on a very small group of people. There are very few undecided voters and they are very hard to reach, but one way to reach them is through local TV.”