About 200 local Democrats, dressed in hippie, casual, hip-hop or business attire, crammed into Obama campaign headquarters in Lancaster city Thursday evening.

"They have to demean him," Mayor Rick Gray said, speaking of recent Republican attack ads aimed at Barack Obama, the Democratic presidential candidate. "They have to reduce him to the lowest common denominator, because if they don't Barack Obama will be the next President of the United States."

Television advertisements by presumptive Republican nominee John McCain and the GOP have aired in recent weeks, often attacking Obama for lacking government experience and for a celebrity-like status at home and abroad.

According to a study released last week by the University of Wisconsin, the media market in and around Harrisburg, including Lancaster, is among the top 10 targeted by both presidential candidates for television advertising. That underscores the region's importance to the Nov. 4 election, not only in Pennsylvania but in the nation.

"Both campaigns see Pennsylvania … in the sense that it's central to their path to the White House," said Chris Borick, a political science professor and pollster at Muhlenberg University.

McCain is coming to York County Tuesday, and a report from the Allentown Morning Call said he will be traveling with former Gov. Tom Ridge and that they will stop Tuesday in Lancaster, too. The McCain camp did not return messages seeking comment on this.

McCain earlier this week predicted Pennsylvania, with its 21 electoral votes, would be not only a pivotal state in the election but the decisive state, the way Ohio was in 2004 and Florida in 2000.

A candidate needs 270 electoral votes to win the White House, and Pennsylvania has more electoral votes than the other battleground states this year: Michigan, Ohio, Virginia and Colorado.

Between June 3 and July 26, the candidates and the Republican National Committee spent $10.3 million on television advertising in Pennsylvania, the most of any state and about $4 million more than second-place Ohio. The Democratic National Committee did not spend any money on television ads during the same time frame.

"I can tell you from the attention we're getting from the national (Republican Party), we're absolutely one of the focuses, if not the focus of the entire nation," said Michael Barley, spokesman for the state Republican Party.

Abe Amoros, spokesman for the state Democratic Party, said Obama needs to spend millions on television advertising because he lost Pennsylvania's primary to Hillary Clinton in April by about 10 percentage points.

"The smart money always goes into television," Amoros said. "It has an emotional impact as it connects to voters."

A breakdown in the number of commercials and where they air shows the geography of McCain and Obama's strategies. Philadelphia and its suburbs received the most ads of any region in the nation, a total of 3,311, according to the Wisconsin study.

The local media market ranks sixth overall with 2,519 advertisements, the study said. It is ahead of such pivotal regions as Columbus, Ohio; Denver, Colo., and Lansing, Mich.

According to pundits and party officials, Gov. Ed Rendell crafted a winning strategy in 2002 and 2006 by dominating the Philadelphia region, including the suburbs, where the number of Democrats has drastically increased, while performing poorly in the rest of the state.

McCain's strategy, then, would be to weaken Obama's numbers in and around Philadelphia and Pittsburgh, while rallying a strong GOP turnout in the rest of the state — which pundits have taken to calling "the T."

The "T" is roughly the shape of Pennsylvania minus the Philadelphia and Pittsburgh areas. It is considered Republican territory, and if McCain is to win Pennsylvania, he needs high voter turnout in this region, including Lancaster and the rest of the Harrisburg media market.

"McCain can't lose (the Philadelphia area) by 90,000 or 100,000 votes," said G. Terry Madonna, director of Franklin & Marshall College's Center for Politics & Public Affairs. "If he loses it by 15,000 and keeps Obama down in the Pittsburgh region, McCain has a chance."

"McCain needs incredible turnout," Borick said. "He would have to have big victory margins in the T and big turnout, which is anything but certain given the conservatives' lukewarm reception for him. He's never been a darling of the conservatives."

Therefore, all the ads.

Tickets for McCain's town hall meeting will be available at Lancaster County Republican Committee headquarters between 9 a.m. and 5 p.m. today and Monday. Headquarters is at 902 Columbia Ave., and the local GOP has only 1,000 tickets to give out.

The McCain event will be held Tuesday at the Toyota Center in the York Fairgrounds. Doors open at 9:45 a.m.

Also Thursday, the Obama campaign opened its local headquarters at 252 Harrisburg Ave. The telephone number is 606-9393.

E-mail: dpidgeon@lnpnews.com