Everybody here needs to see the movie or read the book Moneyball
And you'll soon see the analogy that pops out.
In the early 2000's the Oakland A's lost their best stars to free agency. Jason Giambi and Johnny Damon left after the 2001 season for the Yankees and Jason Isringhausen left for the Cardinals. The Yankees and the Cards wanted these players, so they simply bought them. The A's don't have the kind of money that can compete with the Red Sox, Dodgers, Angels, Cardinals, Braves and certainly not Steinbrenner's Yankees. Two years later they also lost the MVP Miguel Tejada to the Orioles. Barry Zito jumped ship to the Giants after the 2006 season. So you get the idea here.
Yet the A's realized that they could not be a winning team by simply trying to outspend the Yankees and the big money teams. It ain't gonna happen, and even still, the Yankees have only won won World Series since 2001 anyway. The Angels, with the 4th highest payroll have not won or even gone to the Series since 2002. With the Moneyball method that valued efficiency and non-glamorous, not very sexy ways of scoring runs and winning games, the A's fielded a winning, playoff caliber team from 2002-2006. GM Billy Bean knew that you win games by scoring more runs than the other team, rather than just buying up superstars who can put up impressive individual numbers.
The analogy here is that in politics, you seek to maximize votes from the states that are winnable. National ad buys for example, should be deemphasized because it wastes money winning votes in states where your candidate is already a shoe-in to win or lose. Simply carpet bombing the airwaves, regionally or nationally, will only deliver minimal benefits (unless you have a Dukakis/Kerry like opponent who just won't respond at all) in the absence of a well-oiled ground organization that can carefully target voters with individualized messages and raise small amounts of money from many people. In Michigan, you talk about the auto bailout; in Nevada you remind folks that Obama killed the nuclear waste dump; in veteran heavy North Carolina and Virgina, you talk up veterans benefits, etc.
There is also a saturation point at which mere quantity of money spent no longer delivers any additional bag for the buck. When you start getting into 9 (almost 10) digit numbers of spending on both sides, that saturation point will be reached. Yes, money helps. I'd rather have it than not have it. And you do have to have enough to be competitive, but beyond that level, it them comes down to how efficiently those resources are used. Fortunately, Obama is the incumbent and can command free media in ways that the challenger cannot. That will not be an option for the Democrat in 2016.
That is what I suspect Obama and the Democrats should be doing (and I suspect they are). Trying to outraise the Koch brothers and Crossroads GPS is a bottomless rabbit hole. The other side would love us to try that so as to distract the campaign from using resources productively.
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