What does President Obama have in common with his immediate
White House predecessor? Both men spent a disproportionate
amount of their first terms making appearances in battleground
states, Brendan Doherty, a political scientist at the U.S. Naval
Academy, writes in a post on The Monkey Cage political-science
blog. Doherty defines "disproportionate" as a president spending
a greater percentage of days in a state than that state's
percentage of the national population. Defined that way, Obama
and President George W. Bush spent each year of the terms in
which they sought re-election lavishing disproportionate
attention on voters in battleground states. An excerpt from his
post: "A disproportionate focus on battleground states is not
new, and it is not limited to re-election years. Our two most
recent presidents are the only ones who disproportionately
targeted battleground states in every year of their first term
as president. Though only 32 percent of the U.S. population
lived in George W. Bush's battleground s