Talent: It All Comes Down to 25,000 Voters

The Associated Press has a nifty scoop on Sen. Jim Talent's re-election strategy, which focuses on winning "the hearts and minds" of 25,000 undecided Missourians as well as knocking on hundreds of thousands of doors.

From the A.P. story:

In letters this month to prospective donors, Talent offers insight and analysis into his campaign strategy and how he intends to win Missouri's too-close-to-call Senate race against Democratic State Auditor Claire McCaskill.

"Missouri is called a battleground state because it really is," Talent writes in an Oct. 10 letter. "We began this campaign knowing full well that this was going to be a battle over 25,000 votes."

Talent reveals in an Oct. 2 letter that his 2006 campaign budget - produced months ago - called for raising $13.5 million. He says he's already raised $11.5 million and needs $2 million more during the last five weeks before Election Day, noting that McCaskill's campaign is now matching the size of Talent's media buys.

"I'm concerned because I remember my 2002 campaign," Talent writes. "I began that October sprint with a fairly significant lead. But we were outspent in the last month of that campaign by well over $1.5 million and my significant lead melted almost completely away - and we won by just a little over 21,000 votes."

Talent claims in the Oct. 10 letter that his campaign has already made nearly 720,000 volunteer phone calls, knocked on 175,000 doors and made almost 1 million "volunteer contacts."

David Robertson, a University of Missouri-St. Louis political science professor, called those numbers "phenomenal" if they are accurate.

"That's a huge contact list for early October," Robertson said. "The big advantage that Republicans have is their turnout machine. They're certainly going to be in a position to contact enough people to come out to vote to keep it close."