The phone is ringing off the hook and Alyson Linville won’t answer it. She feels pestered by pollsters and political parties eager to know whether she backs Barack Obama or Mitt Romney.
Linville, a 49-year-old mother and wife who works for the local school district, is a swing voter in a swing county in a swing state that’s critical to a very tight US presidential race.
Home is about an hour’s drive from Washington, in a suburb that is affluent, leafy green and split roughly in half between Republicans and Democrats.
Linville voted for Obama in 2008, and even stuck a Vote Obama sign on her front lawn.
But that was four years ago. Now, with the economy still sputtering, she says: “I wish I would have heard how Obama is going to be doing things differently in a second term.”
Linville harbors doubts about the Republican challenger, too.
She spoke to AFP at a Romney rally. The previous week, Michelle Obama spoke right down the street. In September, Romney’s wife Ann stopped by, and in August it was President Obama himself.
Politically speaking, it can get crowded around here.
The way the US electoral system is designed means presidential candidates only campaign in a dozen or so states, largely ignoring the rest of the 50 that make up the United States.
The president is in fact elected by an electoral college made up of delegates from each state, and no matter how small the margin of victory in a given state, the winner gets all of that state’s electoral votes.
Ones that always vote Democrat, such as California, or consistently Republican, like Texas, do not get a lot of attention. Instead, the candidates court voters in states that can go one way or the other.
This year the most coveted jewels include Virginia, Ohio, Florida and Pennsylvania. Humongous sums are being spent to woo people there.
In Virginia, for instance, the Obama and Romney campaigns have already spent $70 million in ads. In New Mexico, by contrast, which is solid Obama country, the total outlay is exactly zero.
“It’s kind of fun. We feel pretty important. We feel like we really are the swing county in a swing state,” said Linville, referring to surrounding Loudon County.
But if seeing a candidate up close is a treat, hearing them ten times a day on TV becomes challenging.
You really do need a calculator to measure how intensely Loudon County voters are being mobbed.
Just in the week that Linville saw Mitt Romney, the Obama campaign and its allies spent $4.1 million on TV advertising in Virginia. The Romney team dished out $4.4 million, according to a data base on the National Journal website.
To this one must add the money spent by national parties, candidates for the senate and Planned Parenthood or same-sex marriage advocates, says the Sunlight Foundation, a group that promotes transparency in electoral spending.
For the average TV viewer this gush of money translates into dozens of ads a day, concentrated in the morning and evening and interspersed with all the other car, medicine and other ads on American television.
When Linville, who is independent, and her Republican husband turn off the TV and go to get the mail, the avalanche keeps spilling out of the mailbox.
“It’s bombarded. We get probably five to ten mailers per day in our mail, every day. We also get at least four to five to six calls a night,” she said, adding that she tells her husband: “Don’t answer it, don’t answer it.”
Armies of volunteers and paid staffers take turns reaching out to voters like Linville from the 27 offices that the Obama campaign has set up in Virginia.
Hundreds more call from home using mobile apps that allow them to avoid footing the cost themselves.
Each conversation is tallied in a data base of people who might conceivably vote for Obama and must be contacted again to urge them to get out and vote, either early, as some states allow, or on election day on November 6.
But as that day approaches, Linville’s vote remains up for grabs. To hear her tell it, it’s been like a pinball game.
She says Romney used to sound moderate to her as governor of Massachusetts, and she liked that, but then he turned “the extreme right Romney.” That pushed her back toward Obama.
But in the last month, she says, Romney has sounded more moderate, like a man who can work with Congress and get things done, whereas Obama has not.
But Romney, in turn, remains tight-lipped on things like how he would close tax loopholes for the rich to offset a tax cut he advocates. So Linville continues to sit on the fence, and watch.
“I keep waiting for something to switch me. I just don’t know. I don’t know,” said Linville.
Voters besieged in swing states in US election
