EARBORN, Mich. - To Michelle DeSantis, the road to the White House appears to be Interstate 94, the suburban highway she takes to work every day.
DeSantis, who is 30 and eight months pregnant, has been stuck in standstill traffic along I-94 outside Detroit twice in the last three weeks, blocked by police as the major presidential candidates zoomed down the emptied highway in their motorcades. The incidents irritated her, but it was just like everything around here these days: All politics, all the time.
At home, DeSantis turns on the television and is bombarded with a string of what she calls ''really annoying'' political ads, sometimes a dozen in a half-hour. Around town, she cannot escape a sea of yard signs and billboards for every imaginable elective post. The newspapers and local news broadcasts are filled with reports of who is campaigning in Michigan - and on any given day, someone is.
Her plight is hardly unique, but it is more rare in this election year than one might think.
As the campaign hurtles toward a close, only about 22 contested states are receiving concentrated attention from the candidates; the other 28, places like Rhode Island and Connecticut, have seen virtually no national ads, and are almost never the site of campaign stops. Of the top 10 media markets in the country, five - including New York and San Francisco - are astonishingly free of national politics. Even Boston, within broadcast range of the up-for-grabs New Hampshire electorate, has seen only extremely limited ad purchases.
Instead, the parties have poured hundreds of millions of dollars into a narrow band of battleground states, buying up all available air time in places like Michigan. At the same time, Michigan is host to an intense US Senate race as well as a controversial ballot initiative for school vouchers, creating unusually spirited public debate.
As entertaining as all the political warfare might seem to those shut out of the action, DeSantis, a public school teacher, cannot wait for it to end. The sheer volume of advertising has left her feeling under siege; rather than help her decide how to vote, it has had the reverse effect, muddling her opinions and, at times, turning her off to the entire process.
''They don't seem to be accomplishing anything,'' she said while eating lunch with a friend outside a Starbucks one recent afternoon. ''The worst part is, they slaughter each other for no reason. They're bad-mouthing each other and not getting down to the issues.... I don't even know if it gets into your subconscious or not.''
Political strategists strongly disagree, arguing that paid advertising provides an uncluttered format in which candidates can hammer home a message or undercut allegations made by an opponent.
This year's advertising expenditures are proof of their confidence: By the end of the conventions, political parties and independent groups had spent approximately $342 million nationwide just on ads devoted to specific issues, such as abortion or guns, according to the Annenberg Public Policy Center at the University of Pennsylvania. Millions more has been spent in the months since.
The campaigns themselves are reluctant to reveal precise amounts spent on advertising, but one independent assessment concluded that the presidential campaigns spent more than $100 million on ads from June 1 to Oct. 8. The Bush campaign and the Republican National Committee spent nearly $47 million in that period, according to a study by Ken Goldstein, a professor at the University of Wisconsin, and researchers at the Brennan Center for Justice at the New York University School of Law. The Democratic National Committee and the Gore campaign spent nearly $42.5 million in those months.
In Michigan, the advertising price tag is expected to exceed $10 million by November; in the Detroit area alone, parties and advocacy groups have spent more than $3 million already to air no fewer than 13,490 ads, making it the fourth most saturated media market in the country.
For the parties, those sums are evidence of fund-raising prowess, one measure by which a candidate is rated. But for people who actually live in key states - not just Michigan, but Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Florida - the question remains: Is all this political advertising reaching its target? And is the deluge of information having the desired result?
Even Michigan Governor John Engler, a prominent Bush supporter, is unsure.
''It's getting very cluttered, and I think it's getting harder and harder for people to penetrate,'' Engler, a Republican, said in an interview. Yet in such a high-stakes competition, in which not only the White House but Senate and House seats are at risk, no politician can afford to abstain from the game, Engler said. ''Nobody knows which ad is the essential one, which one is going to break through.''
Michigan viewers certainly have plenty of political material to sift through - ads and campaign stops, articles and local television news broadcasts, pamphlets and signs along the roadways.
When the television broadcast of the University of Michigan football game broke for a commercial last Saturday, the screen was filled not with SUVs or dot-coms but with an attack on Debbie Stabenow, a Democratic representative who is challenging Republican Spencer Abraham for his US Senate seat. ''Liberal on taxes. Liberal on welfare. Liberal on crime,'' the announcer said ominously, as the address of a Web site opposing Stabenow flashed on the screen.
During the evening news, the flood of advertising increased. First there were images of cooing babies - an ad for Representative Sander Levin, reminding viewers that ''our children are our future.''
Then a picture of oil dripping into a pool of water filled the screen. ''They say oil and water don't mix,'' a deep-voiced announcer warned. ''After 17 years in the oil business, George W. Bush ran for governor then passed laws to let big polluters regulate themselves.'' Over the next 30 minutes, two more anti-Bush ads were played, along with three more negative ads about Stabenow, an ad in favor of Bush's Medicare proposal and another praising Senator Abraham for his votes on health care.
There is some irony in the current bombardment of Michigan; In a sense, it is return fire. In noncampaign years, it is Michigan automakers that saturate the country with auto ads - $6.5 billion on ads in 1999 alone. And to some viewers, the political ads may actually seem less exasperating than regular product commercials, said Kathleen Hall Jamieson, director of the Annenberg Public Policy Center at the University of Pennsylvania.
''We used to see eight product ads, and now we see eight candidate ads. It's not as if some terrible thing is happening to you that wasn't happening to you before. The difference is, you can actually act on it,'' Jamieson said. ''There's nothing worse than seeing a bunch of car ads if you don't plan to buy a car.''
But several dozen Michigan residents interviewed voiced a different emotion - in most cases, frustration. James Halfacer, 43, who runs his own roofing business in neighboring Westland, said he did not even plan to vote after being inundated - police blocking the highway once a week, yard signs everywhere, a mailbox full of literature and, worst of all, ads.
''It's vote no for this, vote yes for that. And all it is is politics,'' he complained. ''They spend too much money and not enough people care. It doesn't have an impact on me. Not one bit.''
