U.S.News & World Report Tumblelog

Where did the attacks on Romney’s Bain Capital record hurt him most? Ohio

Obama’s Stunning Ohio Turnaround

This one’s no secret: the Obama campaign and the SuperPAC Priorities USA did a bang-up job of hammering Romney’s record at Bain Capital, and nowhere was there more bruising than in Ohio, where a disproportionate share of the ads were run and where voters are not surprisingly open to an anti-vulture capitalist message. My colleague Nate Cohn has demonstrated just what an impact the Bain attacks had by studying Romney’s drop in the polls there. What’s striking, though, is that how much bang for the buck the Obama side achieved with them – Priorities has a famous lack of resources, yet managed to get a lot of eyeballs on its ads without spending all that much to air them. Why? Because the ads were so devastating – Romney would say unfair – that they got a lot of airtime on TV and YouTube. The one that is surely the most effective of all – a worker at the Indiana AmPad plant that Bain wiped out, describing how he and his co-workers were ordered to start“building [our] own coffin” – has gotten more than two million YouTube views. And get this – according to Priorities, nearly 350,000 of those were in Ohio.