Senator mcconnell is notorious for, first off, hes not campaigning much. Its hard to find him, hard to see him, hard to ask him a question, so this is giving regular people a chance to ask him a question. It is; obviously, delivering information that people need to know about his record, but without the usual harsh attack ad with the figger in somebody finger in somebodys face. Tell us about the fire truck that was behind us. Us. We shot these in small towns in kentucky and we found that location. So its really trying to capture a little piece of kentucky americana. Pod here todd you told us that a piece of spending not that there was a spending ceiling but there was an effective ceiling. Spending is going up year after year, but i do think that you reach a point of diminishing returns when you have outside groups after outside group throwing these pure post spots and it just means spots with a v. O. And editor uses the stock images. It is a stereotypical negative campaign ad. And i need these office in 2012 in the last two, three weeks we saw outside groups in the house and senate side from both parties literally just throwing money onto the airwaves with ads that if you had actually six months earlier kind of plot it out the spot that we want to put, you know, a Million Dollars behind the last week of the race come of answer would be no. And if i do think that there is a limit to how effective the outside spending can be in the current context that its in and one of the reasons mark alluded to before is the only people who control the candidates themselves is the campaign. We have the ability to take the candidate and put them to interview formats and put their kids in with their families and of this really matters in the statewide races. For congressional races if the bar to get to know actually who your member of congress is but people do want to have a sense of who you are and most super packs have a hard time delivering that kind of information. We all have tivos or some version of them and try to speed through the best work. What are ad makers trying to do to counteract that . I think broadcast has always been the broadest reach in television and certainly they become more targeted at a more effective way to reach voters but its interesting to watch the role of digital grow as well because we target both geographically and demographically through the advertising. And to me it is truly a combination of all and of course radio i think radio is also effective in different areas i think it is more about building an eco chamber so that voters can see you through to tv and cable if they are according through the commercials you know you are serving them through ads online and the radio and there is having that eco chamber. Now we are going to look at a final set of clips. Ive seen a tv ad of a celebrity and it made my dad a little jealous. My dad gave me a good name. A lot of common sense. He said it dont spend what you dont have. Stand on principle even if you have to stand alone if you have to eat you have to work. When youre done with politics give me a hand. I approved this message. Are you a once a week christian . They say senator mark pryor is saying he made a negative statement about his faith challenging him on that faith. Im not ashamed to say that i believe in god and i believe in his word. The bible teaches us no one has all the answers, only god does. Im mark pryor and i approved this message because this is who i am and what i believe. Break this down and tell us what works and what doesnt work. What did you notice as you walked through the mechanics . I thought the father and son approach is an example of what works. You have seen a lot of ads over the years of the candidate and their parent and often times they are corny and forced into too much affection between the two and it doesnt feel real or there is tension between father and son. I did a series of ads with senator landrieu and her father and they are kind of riveting each other. There is tension that is reflective of how a family really is. So i like that piece of it. The congressman comes off as likable site features him in a personality to get a sense of family and i think that works. I think the response from senator pryors campaign is effective that when you dont want to go into is questioning somebodys faith. That is a third rail that can get you into a lot of trouble. That is something the campaign might regret. Do you agree . Its probably accurate. We have a question on the flipsidflip side of what we havt been talking about that has ever been a political ad or is very wellknown add not one of yours but one that is notorious in the profession that tested well but flopped . Like t [laughter] im not going to name any names but they put a bio spots featuring the candidate and the only thing on the air and the negatives went up. [laughter] did that candidate win or lose . The candidate won. They fire the media team. What other trend should people in the room we aware of either that you come up high in the air or that you picked up on . One of the things you and i talked about is reaching people in other ways than over the air tv. While i think i touched on this earlier that seeing the political ads in every medium and how they are going to start to follow you around and that echo chamber in targeting so that they are constantly being exposed to the message so that is near the cycle. Of ththe different platformsr meetings. You will have broadcast tv which is the most effective way to reach. And in cable if you can target a message with different voters and through online you have the banner and the targeting where they are now finding you and being delivered to you. I agree with all of that. The digital side is in a lot of ways the wild west and its technology and the ability to target people in a lot of ways is outpacing the ability to measure it and so it seems like theres a new story about whether it is the thoughts that are jacking up the number of the views that the video has or that you are buying an Online Network and you think that youre going to be placed in a certain place and way and it turns out that what you bought was resold it to somebody else and by the time you get placed its not at all what you were getting and so you are making huge strides and the cycle was better than it was in the last cycle but when we buy tv we have a really good sense of what it is that we are buying and how many people are seeing it. Digital is still getting their. One sentence. You told me that another trend that you are seeing is earlier spending. You told me they come earlier and this is an important conce concept. The reason you are seeing more spending early on number one because there is so much spending now theres so much clutter being up earlier allows you to move numbers in a less competitive market so you can get lower rates, and the second is we are seeing this more and more, you know, there used to be a pretty even slope in terms of your spending where you max out your television spending. But now the add event of the billions of dollars from those being spent by outside groups everyone has a pretty good sense of when the outside groups are going to be polling. They are going to be polling at the end of august and september. So it behooves you to be doing really, really well when those outside groups are taking the pole because thats when they will be deciding that they are going to invest in that race or not. And so, i know the campaigns that are kind of rolling the dice to get the numbers up ear early. Last question. You are a marathoner. What is a running tape . Im a swimmer. Its a long race usually and you cant judge a race in any snapshot in time other than a horse race it really is a Long Campaign in the pot is right. You have to play an earlier game and still be there at the end. And every race is different. They want to thank you for being here and mark putnam, ashley and todd here us. My boss at politico and all of you for the interest in the campaign. Thanks for a great conversation. [applause] [inaudible conversations] thanks to mike allen and everyone for joining us. Before we get started on stage, a quick reminder to everyone here. You can send questions at hash tag campaign pro. I have a great starstudded lineup of panelists here. We dont have visuals like you did the last one because they didnt make for good visuals. We mix the visuals and you will have to listen to us talk. I have two colleagues that are star reporters. Senior political reporters for politico. John is the founder and ceo of social sphere inc. At the Harvard Institute of politics and the doctor later he at the university of Virginia Center for politics and editorinchief of the crystal ball and also a columnist for politico magazine. It now befornow before we get sw many of you are addicted to politico . For how many of you is that your first read in the morning . The honest. And for how many is it your last read at night . And how many of you are politico readers . Thats great. And youre happy with it . Yes, no . Good, good. Well i cant tell you how to respond and the interest at starting something from nothing to something thats really become a must read for a lo a lf people so thank you for your support. Now, todays an important day for all of us here because today is the day of the release of the second politico poll that we did with johns firm and its gotten huge pickup around the country coming and weve been really excited about that. And i want to ask john to open up and ask first about how whats different about the pole and why we think or hope it stands out from others. Thanks for having me. There are a couple of things that are different. I guess the first thing is it is a complete collaboration with frankly everyone on the panel between larrys coastal ball in terms of where the competitive districts and states are. We also work very, very closely with your team to tell us what they are hearing on the trail but what makes i think its most unique is most of the polls in the country do a fine job of measuring Public Opinion on what all of the adults think or likely voters in the Midterm Elections. Four out of four are likely measured in one form or another. What this poll does is for three out of four people that are not going to participate in the competitive district or the house race while what we are doing is focusing on the people that are most likely to vote in the competitive districts only specially 25 to a third of all voters across the country their votes wont really matter in terms of shaping the shortterm view in this country and that is what we are focused on. And we all sat down and did a journalistic exercise where we said what could the headline possibilities before the pole even before we went into the field . Can you talk about that process click the headline ended up being stay out of ukraine. We didnt really know that would be the headline. We didnt know we had a hunch when we started talking about doing the pole. It was clear that things were out of hand in iraq and syria. Things were not as out of hand in ukraine as they are today but the trend lines were not great even a month ago and so it was clear that this was emerging as an area of vulnerability for the president and discomfort for the Congressional Democrats and within the Republican Party but we didnt really know what the voters thought about all of this. We knew that the president s Approval Rating on Foreign Policy was dropping but we didnt know what people would like to see him doing that he wasnt already doing so we decided to go in and in addition to a couple of the questions we asked on the previous poll of the president ial approval and the horse race ballot with the congressional races and the president healthcare law we did this much more detail policy question about the foreignpolicy and National Security, so not just do you like what the president is doing generally speaking but should we be more involved in iraq and less involved as we are now and ask that any member of the sort of global hotspots some of which have gotten hotter since we went into the field. And i think that you might have guessed that the public is not overwhelmingly enthusiastic about the idea of the adventures at this point. I dont know that i would have guessed they were this enthusiastic about the engagement to the point that you have a big majority of republicans saying they support the plan to get everybody out of afghanistan across the age groups and geographically consistent saying what the rest of the world deal with its problems. How might this be relative . The foreignpolicy as we know doesnt always play. [laughter] who was it that said that . Tip oneill back in the day. Its an interesting tension in that we ask people how important is the foreignpolicy or is it important in the terming the vote and you had nine of ten respondents say it was somewhat important or very important and many of those people are liars because they see that its either somewhat or very important but then when you ask them what is the most important issue to you or what is the issue that comes to mind that is important to you and you can go down the list of jobs for economic growth, taxes, deficits from immigration before you get the foreignpolicy described as the Foreign Policy is like 2 . If you add a foreignpolicy National Security defense spending, terrorism, you get to 11 . So the gap between buying of ten people saying it is important and 11 of people saying that somewhere in that set of issues there is something that might be the top three or a come of it is a huge gap. So i think you looked a couple of states and congressional districts in particular where maybe the military bases or big populations. In mississippi last month and in the primarendedthe primary thera huge issue just within the Republican Party and as the democrats voted as well the state likes being conservative is a huge beneficiary of the federal defense contracts pending. So i think that you look to those places and then in addition to sort of moving individual votes you do look to these issues as setting up the larger atmosphere people feel like things are out of control. Speaking of the foreignpolicy, there was interesting findings about her tenure at the state department. Johns numbers brok broke usn a way that you dont see in the polling done so far. Typically its been an up or down for the tenure of state. This is an excellent good fair and poor category. So if you combine the two difference is that most people tend to come of the net for good was 43 i believe, 42, 43. And the net for fair or poor was 53. That was so that was a net majo. That is a big difference than host of the public polling that we have seen over the course of the last year and a half in the state department. And i think some of it is because it isnt being asked and up or down . The do you approve question tends to be easier and what category do you put it in and tell me if you disagree that takes you to refine your view of little bits. So you can attribute it to a couple of things. Number one, as alex has said that length and he is right the world is a very messy place at the moment and the trends have been heading that way the last several months but have a feeling of growing up in the last couple of weeks now Hillary Clinton has been i reject the fact she isnt separating herself on the economy but she certainly has on the foreignpolicy. But i think what the numbers suggest is that isnt necessarily going to matter when things are very messy because she has been out there having to answer questions at having realtime about a foreignpolicy issue that she is no longer involved in and having to defend for instance the recent that doesnt look so great right now in light of the current events. Number two, the port number was the biggest one. For 32 and i think as much as theres been a discussion on twitter and blogs today about whether we were emphasizing the negative too much i think when you have a single category that is that high there is a certain definition and its hard to take it away. I also think as much as i do not think that benghazi will be the reason people do or do not vote for her there is a case to be made with a lot of people have heard about her has related to that. Either poor or positive. Her folks will argue very strongly that the negative isnt sticking that i think that the numbers do suggest there is at least some sense among the voters of something happening. You brought this story on the chapter in her book. How skillfully do you think they have handled were anticipated the attacks on her position . I think thats the benghazi issue and a lot of the foreignpolicy pieces for the most part were not handled thatt well both in the book its been swamped by the discussion of her gaps in wealth, but her critics have actually not laid out a huge glove on the book itself. They would also argue because there isnt that much in the book but generally speaking, in terms of benghazi, she gives a pretty thorough telling that at least gives a roadmap for democrats that are hearing about this in the 2014 election. Where is your crystal ball . I left it in charlottesville. Can you still take a chance and help us without that . I can try. Can you talk a little about your sense of foreignpolicy and how that might be playing out in november . Iab lead in analyzing both president ial and Midterm Elections from 30,000 feet actually after last week i dont think that is a safe place to be. But essentially, the higher your url looking down on the landscape of the election, the more likely you are to detect a general movement in one direction or another. The most interesting thing that i saw the most revealing as usual is a generic ballot because i believed it was plus two republicans. It was plus seven, and i think thats about right and i think other surveys have been showing that, too. Its very important for the midterm Congressional Elections because it tells you basically where it is in midjuly so you have to be careful. But we take a couple observations that are important about the midterms and have nothing to do with foreignpolicy and surprisingly little to do with most domestic policies. This isnt where i thought it would be at this time last year or even for that matter january. I didnt think it would be anything like 2010 because they are already scooping up in the house. They lost a few of them in 2012 but it i isnt what i thought it was going to be. I thought since president obama was in the low 40s depending on the season and some other factors that this would be a predominantly maybe a very good republican year. I think it is mild. At least in midjuly. Now it can be late. You can ha