In the closing weeks of a campaign, candidates and other political actors are required to report mass media expenditures of $500 or more to the Secretary of State within 48 hours. This is designed to publicly expose any large-scale floods of money in a campaign’s closing days. Of course, this depends on somebody in the press paying attention to mass media filings, and so far nobody has. Well, nobody but Your Obedient Serpent.

The most interesting note from recent filings is that Gov. Phil Scott and his ticketmate, Republican LG nominee John Rodgers, filed a total of 17 separate mass media reports on a single day, Monday October 28. Fourteen of them reported major buys of radio ad time, all conducted jointly and with the expenses split evenly between the two campaigns. Two others reported a joint $4,390 TV buy carried out by the Vermont production firm Hen House Media. The 17th filing reported a $2,740 Scott-only TV buy through Hen House which, pardon the pun, is chicken feed for a gubernatorial campaign.

The other 14 reports add up to $36,855 spent on commercial radio. The big winner was VOX AM-FM, which sold an impressive $11,460 in Scott/Rodgers spots on its Burlington-area stations. The rest: $8,000 to the Radio Vermont Group (primarily WDEV), $6,000 to Rutland-based Catamount Radio (105.3 Cat Country, Z97.1 et al), $5,000 to Great Eastern Radio (Frank, Froggy, and the Penguin), $1,006 to Yankee Kingdom Media of Wells River, and $1,000 to Sugar River Radio.

A couple of notes. First, and it pains me to say this as a longtime radio voice, but the medium is dying. I’m old and I worked for decades in radio, and if I don’t listen anymore, then who does? (The only radio I regularly consume is content made available in podcast form.) So why are Scott and Rodgers going so big into radio for their big closing push? It’s a media strategy from a generation ago.

Second, why wait until now? All those ads are going to clutter the airwaves and severely test the patience of those who still listen. Why not start the ads a couple weeks ago?

Third, why is Scott making such an effort to boost Rodgers when the stakes are so much higher in the Legislature?

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