The FiveThirtyEight Team Goes To Iowa

DES MOINES — The Des Moines Register reported earlier this week that Marco Rubio is planning on running 7,000 television ads during the month of January. That’s a staggering number, estimated to be about one-third of all the political ads that will run during the period. The inundation is certainly bearing out in the experience of Meredith Leigh, the Iowa caucus voter I spoke with Tuesday. When we spoke at 7 a.m., she had already seen ads for Hillary Clinton and Rubio. And Leigh reported back at the end of the day that the only other time she watched TV that day was to tune in to “Jeopardy,” a half-hour program with a couple of commercial breaks max. Throughout the course of Alex Trebek’s quiz show, she saw ads for Clinton, Rubio, Donald Trump, Jeb Bush and Bernie Sanders; prime-time TV, Leigh told me, is pretty crazy this time of year. In her opinion, the ads vary from network to network; her viewing of “New Girl” on Fox, for instance, had fewer political ads than say, NBC. Leigh theorized that was because the Fox prime-time network skewed younger (caucus voters tend to be older). But voters seem to be getting hammered even harder on Facebook. Leigh logs on to find mostly Sanders and Clinton ads; she thinks it’s targeted and she’s almost certainly correct. (Facebook thinks that I’m interested in voice recorders and jumpsuits, which is … pretty much on the nose.) But there was at least one bit of old-fashioned electioneering that she ran into when she got home from work: A Jeb Bush flyer shoved underneath her door. It seems print ain’t dead just yet.