Good information.
My rule of thumb is that if you’re outspent more than 2-for-1, up to 10 points can be moved.
Today, campaign managers need to incorporate internet ads into the mix. The dinosaur media is less and less effective. Only a few t.v. shows gain a true mass audience, e.g., the Superbowl.
Two of the arguments for Donald Trump are that he gains tremendous free publicity and his massive rallies are great to GOTV. I prefer to think of “free publicity” as earned publicity, and ads as “bought publicity.” (Analogously, surviving COVID as “earned immunity” and vaccination as “bought immunity.”)
Our big disadvantage in money is a strong argument for self-funding candidates, such as David McCormick of Pennsylvania.
You’re correct about polls. They have more significant flux than the margin-of-error. However, we have a lot of polling data, and the average and the trend are informative.
BUT, this is one of those big buts, undecided voters don’t always split 50-50. That was 2016. The undecideds broke our way. Plus, you can peel off some of the third-party voters even in the moment a voter steps into the voting booth and wonders whether wasting his vote to “make a statement” is really worth it. This also happened in 2016. Finally, the polls can be wrong, meaning biased. This happened in 2020. Trump lost by a surprisingly small margin. If the Green Party candidate and Kanye West were on the ballot in Arizona, Georgia and Wisconsin, Trump probably would have won. WE should be helping the Green Party and Cornel West get on the ballot this year.
I agree and this was my #1 reason for supporting Trump in 2016 -- he was not the most conservative candidate, but he was the ONE candidate who did not need to rely on the liberal media to get his message out, and the ONE candidate who would actually fight back against all the lies and hate which the Democrats would surely throw at him. He would not simply sit back and be intimidated by the media and other Democrats as 99% of Republicans are.
The last thing we needed in 2016 was another spineless milquetoast candidate like Mitt Romney, and I wasn't so sure that Ted Cruz (the actual conservative in the GOP race) wouldn't fold up like Romney did under the barrage of Democrat hatred.
As far as this battleground poll, since they rightfully do not break down things on a district-by-district basis -- the sample sizes are way too small for the results to have any meaning at all -- we can't know how things would shake out if they lopped off some districts which aren't really marginal (RI-2, NY-3 post-gerrymandering, FL-27 and CT-5 probably) and added numerous others which ARE (AK-At Large, NY-4, MI-8, CA-49, CA-27, CA-22 and many others).
However at least trying to focus on the true tossups, as they are attempting to do, is a much better approach than sampling in all 435 districts. That approach is rather pointless since at least 350 of the 435 districts are foregone conclusions. If the number of Republican sure-thing House districts is roughly equal to the number of Democrat sure-things then those polls may have some minor value, but focusing on the most competitive districts is much smarter.