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money, and seemed potentially more likely to pull an upset. However, following
Bradley’s large loss in Iowa and McCain’s subsequent surprise win in New Hampshire,
the media attention pulled away from the Democratic race to the suddenly more
interesting Republican race. This occurred even though Bradley was relatively successful
in New Hampshire, pulling in a respectable 47% of the vote in the Democratic primary.
Nonetheless, media attention pulled away from the Democrats and began to focus on the
Republicans.
Even though the media began pulling away from their coverage of Bill Bradley
after the New Hampshire primary, he had still raised a fair amount of money, which was
also bolstered by federal matching funds. Thus he could still provide information about
himself to help his candidacy. Table 5 shows the mean levels of candidate spending
before and after the New Hampshire primary, as well as the mean level for the entire
period. What we see from this table is that after the New Hampshire primary, Bill
Bradley actually increased his average daily spending amounts, and by a greater amount
than did Al Gore. This is likely due in part to the structure of federal campaign finance
laws, which impose state-by-state spending limits. Prior to New Hampshire, the
candidates were focused mostly on one state at a time, while after that primary, there
were multiple states they could then go to and spend money. But that is not all that is
going on here, as Gore’s spending did not increase by as much as Bradley’s, even though
they had spent relatively similar amounts prior to New Hampshire. Bradley’s increased
spending during this period is likely attributable to a last-gasp effort at winning
something in order to stay viable in the race, whereas Al Gore was able to spend more
Convention