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Bloomberg…
Ohio
Voters Disapprove All Ads as Campaigns
Take Over TV
By
Mark Niquette
Oct
3, 2012
As
“Access Hollywood” plays in Pamela Wilson’s living room, a commercial
featuring
a crying girl in a stroller appears and a worried voice says, “The
future is
getting worse under Obama.” Wilson pulls up a casino game on her laptop.
Looking
up, Wilson, a 64-year-old retired postal worker who lives in
Reynoldsburg,
Ohio, a Columbus suburb, said she would rather play games, check e-mail
or read
a book than watch another presidential campaign spot.
“It
just really gets frustrating because you hear the same thing over and
over
again,” Wilson said in an interview. “I have gotten to the point that I
don’t
hear them most of the time.”
Ohio,
one of the states that may decide the U.S. presidential election, had
132,469
commercials aired in the race from April 10 through Sept. 24 at an
estimated
cost of $72.5 million, more than any other state, according to data
from New
York-based Kantar Media’s CMAG. Watching them consecutively would take
a month
and a half. Like voters across the nation, Ohioans are strongly divided
on
partisan lines. One thing unites them: They all hate the ads.
‘Obvious
Manipulation’
Wilson
and other Ohio voters interviewed in front of their televisions or by
telephone
say they’re sick of the bombardment. They don’t trust President Barack
Obama,
Republican challenger Mitt Romney or the 18 outside groups airing ads
in Ohio
to impart accurate or honest information.
“It’s
an obvious manipulation, and I don’t appreciate it,” said Audrey
Gellman-Chomsky, 23, while watching TV with her mother in Bexley just
outside
of Columbus. “I don’t pick my laundry detergent or my toilet paper
based on the
cutest animal, either.”
If
you watched all the presidential ads aired in Ohio back- to-back, it
would take
46 days, according to the CMAG data.
Besides
those, there were more than 13 days’ worth of commercials aired in the
U.S.
Senate race between Democratic incumbent Sherrod Brown and Republican
challenger Josh Mandel from July 2011 through Sept. 17, according to
CMAG. Only
the Montana Senate race attracted more.
No
Respite
Ohio
is a battleground state that elected Brown in 2006 and supported Obama
with
51.5 percent of the vote in 2008, then two years later elected Governor
John
Kasich and other Republicans to statewide office. No Republican has won
the
presidency without carrying Ohio, and the last Democrat to do it was
John F.
Kennedy in 1960…
Read
the rest of this article at Bloomberg
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