Clout: Suddenly, it's all about Pa.

AFTER MONTHS of ignoring Pennsylvania's 20 electoral votes - President Obama counting on them, Republican Mitt Romney seeming to write them off - suddenly both campaigns are all about the Keystone State.

Clout hears that Romney may appear at a rally in southeastern Pennsylvania on Sunday afternoon, with Bucks County being the most likely locale. The trip was still being ironed out and may not be finalized until Friday.

Romney's pick for the vice presidential post, U.S. Rep. Paul Ryan, will campaign Saturday afternoon at the Harrisburg airport.

A Romney visit here would cap a closing week of the presidential campaign that must have television executives leaping for joy.

Romney's campaign on Tuesday said that it would start running commercials in the state for the first time. Obama's campaign quickly followed suit.

Then came the charge of the PAC brigade, as pro-Romney political-action committees jumped into the media mix.

Restore our Future, Americans for Job Security, The American Future Fund, Americans for Prosperity and American Crossroads all put millions into new commercials in Pennsylvania.

The two campaigns took turns calling each other "desperate."

Obama's logic: Romney is flailing in true battleground states, so he had to throw a "Hail Mary pass" in Pennsylvania.

Romney's logic: Polling shows the race narrowing, so the campaign is "expanding the map" to take advantage here and in Minnesota and Michigan.

"Can we win all of them?" Romney senior adviser Russ Schriefer asked. "Can we win some of them? I think so."

Obama senior adviser David Axelrod said that the campaign had a "contingency fund" ready to pay for the late-in-the game efforts.

"We're doing it because it's the prudent thing to do," Axelrod said. "We're not going to cede any state in this race."

Former President George W. Bush prevailed twice without winning Pennsylvania. His father, former President George H.W. Bush, was the last Republican to win the state, in 1988.

The Democratic National Committee on Thursday noted that Republicans have made last-ditch plays for Pennsylvania in every presidential race since 1992.

Philadelphia's building-trade unions - leadership and members - often are perceived as being monolithically supportive of Democratic candidates.

That's not accurate, although they do often provide the Election Day manpower for Democratic campaigns. One of the unions, Local 98 of the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers, mailed a six-minute video to its 4,000 members this week, urging them to vote for Obama.

The video hits Romney for comments he made during a speech in February to the Associated Builders & Contractors group, pledging to overturn an 81-year-old law that requires contractors to pay a local prevailing wage on federally funded projects.

Union officials, including Pat Gillespie, business manager for the Philadelphia Building Trades, expressed concern in the video about union members supporting Republicans like Romney.

"We have a number of people who are coming out on Election Day and voting against their own self-interests," Gillespie said. "We have to stop that. We at least have to make them aware of it."

Republicans backed by Local 98 in the past include former U.S. Sen. Rick Santorum and Gov. Corbett.

Professor David Schuff and his colleagues at Temple University's Fox School of Business watched the growing role of social media in the 2008 presidential election and set out to answer this question: "How much is your next Twitter follower worth to a campaign?"

Thus was born Translating the Effectiveness of Media into Performance, a/k/a TEMPO.

The team designed software to search for campaign references in Twitter feeds, Facebook pages, YouTube hits and blog posts. They partnered with LexisNexis to add print and broadcast mentions of campaigns under study.

And then they incorporate into TEMPO scoring individual hits to candidate websites.

The bid by U.S. Sen. Bob Casey Jr. for a second term and his challenger, Republican Tom Smith, is one of the many races TEMPO has been tracking for months.

"For a statewide race, it's pretty anemic," Schuff said. "There doesn't seem to be a lot happening. They're not gaining momentum in terms of social media."

Smith leads Casey in TEMPO's social-media scoring. That could be a result of Casey being much better known, although Smith, a political novice, has more novelty.

The Senate races in Missouri and Massachusetts, by comparison, are far more active when it comes to social-media hits.

Academics are always in search of the next question. Post-election, the TEMPO team will study the data and try to determine if social media drive political polling or if political polling drives social media. They also will try to determine which social-media platforms are most effective in political campaigns.