I'm Chad Orzel, and I Disapprove of These Messages

I was in college in New Hampshire (Franklin Pierce) during the 1988 elections. I gave up watching television (even my beloved Redskins) because of the adds. I lived off campus (on (I am not kidding) Benny Hill Road) and our phone was listed as residential, not a dorm phone. I got at least eight calls in one week (I lost count of the total) asking me to participate in a poll. For the first few, I explained that I was registered in Maryland and they should call someone else. By the third poll, I was having fun: I descibed myself to the polster as a born-again pro-abortion anti-death-penalty Republican and answered every third question honestly. The other two thirds I just had fun with. I have no idea what my answers did to the polling, but I have never put a great deal of faith in polls since then.

Iowan here. If you dislike the campaign ads, consider: we get a good five to ten phone calls every. Single. Day. Plus two to five pieces of junk mail, six days a week. Plus one or two commercials at every commercial break, on every station. At least in this household, the TV is mostly Huckabee, Clinton and Obama, the junk mail is mostly Edwards (though Hillary's junk mail was the most elaborately overproduced campaign mail I've ever seen, and which Obama flyer you get seems to depend a lot on what demographic his campaign believes you fit into), and the phone calls (what few actually leave messages or get answered) tend to be Dodd.

My parents, who are Republican (probably not their fault: I understand it comes as part of the evangelical package deal. Being evangelicals is their fault, obviously.), say it's the same for them.

I understand that it's not actually fair, demographically or in any other sense, to give the first rounds to IA and NH, but the people who complain about that might want to be careful about what they wish for.

It is incompetent fascists, corporatists, and double-digit IQ christ-besotted jackasses against bleeding heart Liberals, welfare pimps, Enviro-whiners, feminazis, and Queer Nation. Choose wisely.

Let it all implode. Let the Church of Rome forever battle Mecca as oceans of stinking peasants grow turnips and are alternately whipped and cajoled with incredible tales of cities, supermarkets, and aspirin.

I went to college in NH, and this is all so true. I saw my first ad last January. It was for Romnoid. It gave me a spooky "and so it begins..." feeling.

I was in Iowa for the holidays, so I know what you mean. The commercials I found most amusing were the ones where the candidate was actually the person talking and then at the end said, "I am So-and-so and I approve this message." I kept waiting for them to say, "I am So-and-so and what I just said was a load of crap."

Billy, the odds are that most of those polls weren't actually looking to collect meaningful data, but were actually "push polls" designed to influence your opinion regarding a candidate (or candidates) via the content and tone of the questions being asked. For blogging coverage of some recent push polling, check out Making Light (there's a link to the left; I'm lazy this morning).

Ahhhh liv n Neu Hampster an' affa awl oaf tis adds, ah cun tale u thet et doan affact me et awl.....buh buh buh buh

Thank the FSM for caller id...let the damn thing ring.

As a transplant to NH, I gotta say I don't get it. How the hell this place ever got to be so important in the election process baffles me. We don't have sufficient electoral votes to impact anything and yet here we are along with Iowa driving the process forward...I be cornfused.

I'm guessing that if Giuliani has any success with his 'big states' strategy then NH/IA are out of the picture.

I can't wait for the primary to be over.

At some level there is little difference between a presidential candidate and a telemarketer who calls you up during the dinnertime and urges you to purchase a their car insurance

Skwid: I have to say that way back in the late 80s, only about 10% of the polls I participated in seemed even somewhat to be push polls. I think (and I may be wrong (my teenage daughter would remove the word 'may')) that push polls really came into their own in the 92 election.

Like Doug #7, I have adopted New Hampshire as my home state. I've solved the TV ad problem by not owning a TV, but I still get oodles of phone calls (which, thanks to caller ID, I leave for my answering machine) as well as oodles of political junk mail, plus occasional visits from supporters of candidates. I happen to have no declared party affiliation, so I get to be annoyed by both parties. This year seems to be particularly bad because it's wide open on both sides.

Examples of the lengths to which some candidates are going: I got a Christmas card from Hillary this year. OTOH, the Edwards campaign (their reps came while I was not at home) left a respectably thick booklet going into details about their candidate's positions.

Milkshake #8 has overlooked a crucial distinction between telemarketers and political calls: the Do Not Call list. The politicians exempted themselves from the Do Not Call List rules, so while my telemarketing calls are limited to the occasional scofflaw, during the past week I have received at least half a dozen calls a day, including multiple messages left by a Republican push poller from Virginia (703 area code) who doesn't wait for my answering machine message to finish.

OMG! Yes! The answering machine thing! We get messages constantly where the message plays, then we hear the background noise in a call center somewhere for a few seconds, and then they say something random and hang up. Or they say nothing at all and hang up. Or we get the last five seconds of a 30-second message. I don't understand this. Are they not listening to the line they're dialing? How can they not know when to talk and when not to talk? Surely politicians have heard about answering machines by now, no?

Most of the time, we don't have any actual numbers to go along with the calls: caller ID just shows "unknown name unknown number" for many of them.

I think I got a push poll favoring Huckabee a couple days ago, or at least I can't make sense of the things I was asked unless it was a Huckabee-leaning push poll. The questions seemed to be trying to find some point where I and Huckabee agreed on something, and when no such point turned up, the poll was over. I can't prove anything -- I just know I looked up the company that identified itself as the source of the call ("Common Sense Issues") after I got it, and found out that they had been getting some negative publicity for doing Huckabee-leaning push polls in NH.

st of the time, we don't have any actual numbers to go along with the calls: caller ID just shows "unknown name unknown number" for many of them.

For me the caller ID box usually provides a phone number, but in most cases it either doesn't identify the caller or provides some nondescript identifier like "FEDR 07" (which happens to be the aforementioned push poller). The one exception in the last two weeks has been the Obama campaign, who has had the decency to call from a number identified with their candidate (presumably their Dover office, since the exchange is from Dover and that is their closest campaign office to my location).

Something I forgot to mention last night which bears on Chad's original complaint: There's a good reason the candidates are advertising on Boston-area TV stations. The reason is that the Big Three networks have among them one affiliate in New Hamphire, namely ABC affiliate WMUR in Manchester. There is an NBC affiliate in White River Junction (just over the Vermont border), but for NBC outside the Upper Valley (Hanover/Lebanon area) and CBS statewide they count on the Boston stations to cover New Hampshire.

It could be worse. One of the years I lived in the Upper Valley, one of my roommates had a TV, and it was a Congressional election year. I got bombarded by ads from four different states: Vermont and New Hampshire candidates advertising on the local station, Massachusetts candidates advertising on the Boston stations, and candidates from the Plattsburgh, NY, area advertising on a Burlington station the local cable company carried.