I would argue that the benefits of a national campaign are in fact practical benefits to his election prospects and the primary reason for running such a campaign. The Times article lists more than enough reasons why a national campaign helps his election prospects to make any alternative explanation unnecessary. The Obama campaign has said this is the kind of campaign they would run since early in the primaries. They said they were going to challenge McCain in traditionally Republican states and that this would improve his election prospects. Clinton’s campaign countered she would certainly win OH and this would win her the election. Running a national campaign is one of the major reasons he has so many resources in the first place. And I’ll still bet he doesn’t spend the few days prior to the election in GA or MT. He’ll spend it in the states crucial to his election.

Here’s a brief excerpt: (from http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/19/magazine/19obama-t.html?pagewanted=2&bl&ei=5087&en=7349c3908c52867d&ex=1224388800 )

“Mathematically, Obama can probably win the election without winning any of these states — or Nevada or Montana or any of the other conservative states where he has campaigned in the past several months. What he probably can’t do, if he doesn’t convert enough voters to throw at least a few traditionally red states into the blue column, is get beyond what he dismissively refers to as the “50-plus-1” governing model, the idea that a president need only represent 50 percent of the country (plus 1 additional vote) to command the office. From the start, Obama has aspired not simply to win but also to stand as a kind of generational break from the polarized era of the boomers, to become the first president in at least 20 years to claim anything more than the most fragile mandate for his agenda. Absent that, even if he wins, Obama could wake up on Nov. 5 as yet another president-elect of half the people, perched uncomfortably on the edge of an impassable cultural divide.”

and a little later:

“It is also true, however, that a series of circumstances beyond his control have conspired to make a truly national campaign more feasible for Obama than for any Democrat since Carter ran in the dark days after Watergate. First, of course, there is the national sense of despair over the Bush era, which has made the president more of a uniter than he ever intended and which has enabled Democrats to get a hearing in parts of the country where they were being run off the land 10 years ago. Then there’s the advent of the Internet as a veritable money vacuum, which has enabled Obama to raise more money than any Democrat in history (about $460 million, at last count), meaning he can afford to pour some resources into states he has only a remote chance of winning. Perhaps most important, though, Obama’s campaign has also been able to take advantage of a drawn-out Democratic primary campaign that came through all 50 states before it was over — a draining experience that nonetheless established networks of volunteers and newly registered Democratic voters in states that in any other year would have been overlooked. In three states — Texas, Indiana and North Carolina — more people voted in Democratic primaries this year than voted for Kerry on Election Day in 2004.”

“For Obama’s political advisers, expanding the electoral map is not about making a philosophical statement; it is simply a strategic imperative. Presidential campaigns, after all, are about getting to 270 — the minimum number of electoral votes needed to win. In relying on the same 20 or so winnable states over the past few elections, Democratic nominees have given themselves almost no margin for error. By contrast, Obama’s campaign, in addition to fighting for the usual complement of about a dozen swing states, has shifted considerable resources into a group of states — the list has, at one time or another, included Virginia, North Carolina, Indiana, Montana, Nevada, North Dakota and Georgia — that haven’t been strongly contested for at least three elections, if not longer. (Alaska was on the list, too, until McCain chose Sarah Palin as his running mate.) The idea here is that the more states you put in play, the more permutations there are that lead to victory.”

So, clearly there is a practical advantage to running in many states that cannot be ignored. Nonetheless, I was reminded of one of the readings from your Presidency seminar in which the author compared the popular vote totals, composition of congress, and electoral vote margins of each president. The overall trend showed that the power of presidents, as judged by these statistics, had been declining in the modern era. A conscious effort by Obama to reverse this trend (and helped by external circumstances) may bode well for his power prospects, if he is elected.

But if you check Florida, N.H. or Colorado you get a much more dynamic slope for each of the two candidates.

What does this till you about polarization or open mindedness or whatever about these two different types of states.

Jack