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At the conclusion of a March post investigating the ever-changing definition of a campaign cliché — “battleground states” — we warned, “If this thing keeps growing, there won’t be many states left that someone, somewhere, has not defined as ‘a battleground.'”
Today, the “Land of Lincoln” was the latest state to fall prey to this infectious description. In an Associated Press story filed from Chicago earlier today Mike Glover wrote, “After a week of turmoil and mounting deaths in Iraq, Kerry was focusing on jobs and the economy in a Midwest battleground state where 142,000 industrial jobs have been lost in the last three years.”
A quick look at the facts offers little evidence that Illinois is worthy of “battleground” status. According to a late March report released [35K PDF] by the Wisconsin Advertising Project, which monitors political advertising, neither the Bush campaign nor the Kerry campaign have spent a cent advertising in Illinois. (Sort of makes one want to live in Illinois, no?)
Nor is this a surprise to anyone. Back on March 4, when Bush launched his first advertising campaign, Bob Kemper and Jeff Zeleny wrote in the Chicago Tribune, “The advertisements will be aired in the Midwestern swing states of Iowa, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri and Ohio. No commercials will be shown in Illinois, except on specialty cable channels. “
Advertising aside, Illinois is not a “battleground” for a simple reason: the Democratic candidate for President has won Illinois’ electoral votes in the last three elections. In 2000, Gore handily defeated Bush by a resounding 12 percent margin, securing 54.6 percent of the vote.
Indeed, further down in his dispatch, Glover shoots the legs out from under his own premise: “Illinois is a state that has trended Democratic in recent elections and is one Kerry likely must win in the fall. [Democratic Senatorial candidate Barack] Obama said there’s a solid chance Kerry can lock up the state even before the fall campaign.”
Those aren’t the war cries of a man fighting for his life in “a battleground state.”
–Thomas Lang
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