Taking advantage of his huge financial edge, Senator Barack Obama is buying large amounts of advertising and building extensive get-out-the-vote operations in Ohio and Texas in an effort to deal Hillary Rodham Clinton twin defeats on Tuesday that could end her bid for the presidency.
The intensity of Mr. Obama’s drive is especially apparent on television, where, using his huge financial advantage, he has outspent Mrs. Clinton by nearly two to one in the two states, helping him to eat deeply into double-digit leads in polls that she held just weeks ago.
But after a month in which she raised $32 million — a remarkable sum but still less than the $50 million or more brought in by Mr. Obama — Mrs. Clinton is fighting back. Their expenditures, combined with a travel schedule that sent Mrs. Clinton and Mr. Obama and their surrogates from border to border in Texas and Ohio, reflect the expectation that the voting on Tuesday may be climactic. Mrs. Clinton’s advisers have suggested that she will bow out of the race if she falters in either state, after 11 straight losses.
Their face-offs are not just on television. Mr. Obama has a town-hall-style meeting in Westerville, Ohio, on Sunday afternoon. Mrs. Clinton just announced one there, too. Mr. Obama will be at Westerville Central High School, Mrs. Clinton at Westerville North High School.
Close races in both states
Polls show the race deadlocked in Texas, while Mrs. Clinton’s lead in Ohio has been whittled away, though she does still lead.
“Senator Obama is spending a lot of money on TV — if this can be purchased, he can win it,” Gov. Ted Strickland, who has campaigned across the state with Mrs. Clinton, said in an interview. “I think we’ve survived the initial blast of the Obama phenomenon, and we’re now holding steady.”
In a sign of Mr. Obama’s confidence and his strategy of amassing delegates wherever he can, he spent part of Saturday in Rhode Island, which with Vermont votes on Tuesday.
Mrs. Clinton’s aides said she remained confident of winning Ohio and Texas and would press on with her campaign, as signaled by her increasingly tough attacks on Mr. Obama.
In recent days, Mrs. Clinton’s advisers have pointed to Mr. Obama’s financial advantage, in what appears to be an attempt to lay the groundwork to stay in the race should she lose by a small margin, or squeak to victory by a few votes in either or both states. “They are dumping a lot of money there,” said Mark Penn, Mrs. Clinton’s chief strategist, referring to the Obama campaign.
Narrow Clinton victory not enough?
That said, Mrs. Clinton once enjoyed double-digit leads in both states, and her campaign had told supporters concerned about her string of losses that her campaign would get back on track after solid wins in Ohio and Texas. Democrats said that a narrow victory in both states might not be enough to stanch a flow of uncommitted superdelegates — elected officials and party leaders — to Mr. Obama who have until now deferred to the request by Mrs. Clinton’s advisers to wait for the vote in the two states.
Mr. Obama has spent about $10 million on television advertising in Texas from early in February through Election Day, campaign officials said; Mrs. Clinton has spent just less than $5 million. Mr. Obama has spent about $5.3 million for television advertising in Ohio, compared with just under $3 million for Mrs. Clinton, the officials said.
Those figures do not take into account substantial advertising being presented for Mr. Obama by the . It also fails to include money that Mr. Obama and Mrs. Clinton spent in Texas on Spanish-language television and radio stations in a competition for Latino voters who Mrs. Clinton had once considered an unassailable part of her base. “I have many friends in Texas; I know your tradition and culture,” Mrs. Clinton said in one broadcasting in Houston this weekend, speaking into the camera as subtitles translate her remarks into Spanish.
Mr. Obama’s financial advantage is helping him beyond the airwaves.
His campaign flew 200 paid organizers from across the country to 10 campaign offices in Texas right after the Feb. 5 primaries, aides said, when some of Mrs. Clinton’s staff members were volunteering to work without pay. Another 150 were sent to build get-out-the-vote networks in Ohio, working for Paul Tewes, who was the Obama campaign’s director in Iowa, where Mr. Obama’s eight-point victory gave his campaign a boost.
Mrs. Clinton’s on-the-ground effort is no less aggressive and extensive; in particular, she has tapped into the network of support provided to her by Mr. Strickland. But in both states, her corps of workers is made up largely of volunteers, many from the two states but others who came here and to Texas on their own dime, typically from Washington and New York, some responding to an e-mail plea sent out by .
“We need as many people on the ground in Texas, Ohio, Rhode Island and Vermont as we can get,” Ms. Clinton wrote.
To deal with the geographic demands of two diverse states, Mrs. Clinton and Mr. Obama were relying on surrogates to carry their message. For Mrs. Clinton, it was , the former House Democratic leader from Missouri, who was a longtime opponent of trade deals like Nafta and was campaigning in the blue-collar Mahoning Valley.
For Mr. Obama, it was , the popular indie-rock group who announced they would perform for Mr. Obama at Stuart’s Opera House in Nelsonville on Sunday. Nelsonville is not far from Ohio University and many of the younger voters that Mr. Obama seeks.
(Aides to Mrs. Clinton, distressed at the defection of a band with many fans in the Clinton headquarters, noted that the band was Canadian; in fact, while its members live there now, they grew up in Texas.)
A knock on every door
If the Clinton and Obama campaigns succeed at their goals, every Democrat in the state will get a knock on the door from a supporter of one candidate or the other. Thousands of Mr. Obama’s supporters gathered Saturday morning at 75 staging stations.
In Texas, Mr. Obama’s campaign began the final part of its Caucus Education Program to make certain its supporters understood a complicated Texas voting procedure. It includes first a primary, where two-thirds of the delegates are chosen, followed by a caucus, where the remaining third are picked. Volunteers went door-to-door, leaving pamphlets explaining what the campaign had come to call the Texas Two Step, to remind Mr. Obama’s supporters that they had to vote twice.
Mr. Obama has repeatedly defeated Mrs. Clinton in caucuses, and his aides said because of that, Mr. Obama could end up winning more Texas delegates on Tuesday, even if he lost the popular vote. Mrs. Clinton’s aides said Saturday that in part because of defeats she had suffered to Mr. Obama in caucuses, they had made an all-out effort to identify voters who would get out for both the primary during the day and caucus at night.
Aggressive use of Internet
Mr. Obama has been particularly aggressive in these contests in using Internet tools to identify and turn out supporters, building on tools they have developed throughout the campaign. For example, anyone using the search engine Google to look for Texas caucus locations will see an advertisement from Mr. Obama’s campaign listing the caucus sites, and, after a click, inviting people to sign in with their names and e-mail addresses.
Visitors to the Web sites of The Houston Chronicle and The Cincinnati Enquirer were confronted with a moving advertisement that took up nearly half the screen that showed a video of Mr. Obama and urged voters to sign up and pledge their support to his campaign.
“We are trying to grow the electorate,” said David Plouffe, Mr. Obama’s campaign manager, referring to the Internet effort. “We have had almost 20,000 people come through our ads looking for their early vote location.”
In Ohio, both candidates have focused on the urban areas and suburbs around major cities, but Mrs. Clinton is campaigning as well in rural areas and southeast Ohio, which she views as one of the strongest parts of the state. (It is where Mr. Strickland did particularly well in his election as governor.)
In Texas, both candidates staged last-minute efforts in Dallas, Houston and San Antonio, where both Mrs. Clinton and Mr. Obama had rallies Friday evening. Mrs. Clinton’s campaign brought in Mayor of Los Angeles as part of an extensive roster of Latino surrogates sent across South Texas reflecting the intensity of the struggle for those voters.
Mr. Obama focused on parts of the state with large concentrations of African-American residents, from Beaumont in East Texas to Houston, both with significant populations of evacuees from .
Clinton tailors her appeals
In Texas, Mrs. Clinton presented a television advertisement starkly suggesting that Mr. Obama was not ready to lead the world in dangerous times, while in Ohio she appealed to blue-collar voters by attacking trade and tax policies that she said unfairly protect corporations.
Mr. Obama used his Texas advertisements to denounce business as usual in Washington, reprising an attack on Mrs. Clinton. In Ohio, he stressed his opposition to the North American Free Trade Agreement, which was passed while was president.
The extent of Mr. Obama’s financial advantage was increasingly clear this weekend and stirred concern among Mrs. Clinton’s supporters.
Mr. Obama has already begun spending money on staffing and television advertisements in some states coming up after Tuesday; Mrs. Clinton’s expenditures there have been minimal.
Mrs. Clinton will hold a 60-minute town-hall-style forum on Monday near Austin; her campaign purchased time on the Fox sports channel to broadcast it statewide. Mrs. Clinton’s aides said part of the choice of that venue was to reach white male voters who have moved steadily to Mr. Obama; the bigger reason, they said, was that Fox is a relatively inexpensive television outlet.
Mrs. Clinton’s advisers said that a provocative television advertisement that she began broadcasting on Friday — showing children sleeping while a narrator asks who would be better able to deal as president with a middle-of-the-night telephone call or a crisis — would be shown only in Texas. Part of that strategy was based on the calculation that the security message would resonate better in Texas than Ohio, where the economy is the overwhelming issue. But another aspect, an aide said, was that the advertisements would gain free coverage in the Ohio news media, saving money.
Jeff Zeleny contributed reporting from San Antonio.
