He can't even do a full week at $160,000--a full week is around $250,000

It's not really the black and white.

Business Journal article was right that rates have spiked because of political activity, but television ad rates aren't purely rational and therefore the rates haven't moved up uniformly.

There are what I would call vanity shows - like the Channel 5 news - where you pay more for a "point" than you do for the 2am Hogan's Heroes re-runs, even though you can target and reach the same demographic.

It suits Carnahan campaign and others to simplify it, as if you are buying membership to a club and you either have the money or you don't. In reality there isn't one single way to use television that costs $250,000. Media buyers put together packages with different variables.

To continue on, just a bit. The Mark Smith campaign doesn't appear to have the ground forces that Jeff Smith, Joan Barry, Mariano Favazza have. So Jeff Smith, for example, has some strategic flexibility. If he decides against television to get the word out, he invests more heavily in ground-level activity - yard signs, literature, phone calling - and has the volunteers to help implement it. For other candidates, television really is their only hope to reach enough voters to have a chance to win.

The problem is that media buys are pretty well understood in terms of reaching enough voters. Maybe flexible cable buys would work, but that would be a nightmare in the 3rd. In the 1st it'd be easy, but in the 3rd you have so many submarkets to buy for. Over the air buys are limited in how many people you can reach that are actually voters. If MSmith can target enough Democratic primary voters he might make it work, but no one has that level of detail on the target audiences.

Carnahan is going to go with a standard buy and he'll only have enough for about 1 1/2 weeks though so the impact might be smaller than we think.

Why would anyone donate to Mark Smith at this point in the campaign?

Great guy. But...