Obama’s poll spending is obscene

What’s up with all that polling the Obama camp is doing? Recently the folks over at the Weekly Standard combed through campaign spending disclosure records of the Obama campaign and related committees, discovering that they’ve spent $15 million on polling since the first of the year. And some of the June spending is still unaccounted for. Oh, my! From one perspective, spending $15 million on polling reeks of desperation. They are on a massive snipe hunt, trying to evaluate the appeal of every alleged accomplishment of the president and to gauge the credibility of every anti-Romney tidbit their dirt-diggers have dredged up.

Let’s try to put some metrics to this. Using my own firm’s rate card, $15 million for polls would compute to about 6 million minutes of polling time. Assuming interview lengths of 10 minutes, that’s like 600,000 interviews. More than a half-million times, the Obama campaigners may have approached randomly sampled Americans to see what works and what doesn’t. Honk if you’ve been polled. Out of those many interviews, someone who’s been on the receiving end of a call or online survey needs to share with us what they’re asking. Is it cloying? Is it cunning? Is it crazy? Inquiring minds want to know.