Abstract:
To examine the effects of the 2008 Obama campaign’s targeted media effort aimed at Latino voters, we married 2008 campaign media data from multiple sources to survey data on registered Latino voters in Nevada and Arizona to examine the specific impact of advertisement buys on that population. In the presence of controls, Obama’s media spending advantage over McCain had a significant and positive relationship with an Obama vote. When looking at local broadcast, cable and radio specifically, we find a significant relationship between spending differentials on local broadcast advertising and vote intention but not between spending differentials on radio and cable buys.
