[paper]
The objective of this paper is to model strategic campaigning in the presence of both vote buying (persuasion) and turnout buying (mobilization). The existing literature on strategic campaigning concludes that political candidates should concentrate their campaigning efforts either on safe districts or on swing districts. This paper shows that when candidates can use both persuasion and mobilization strategies, and the ideology of voters is unknown to the incumbent party, a third option should be taken into account. In fact, the optimal campaigning strategy -rather than focusing on safe or swing districts -should target opposition strongholds, i.e. the incumbent should try to buy those districts in which the challenger is favored. The intuition for this result is simple. Since the incumbent does not know individual preferences (he only observes the distribution of preferences in the districts), all voters in a given district look identical to him. Hence, when approaching voters in a district to buy their vote, the incumbent always faces the risk of buying the vote of his supporters (who would have voted for him anyway).