The President's efforts to target LFEs ought to depend on the effects he expects spending in different geographic areas will have on his election prospects. The biggest effects, and therefore the most vigorous targeting efforts, may or may not reflect direct responses to LFEs by voters. If it is difficult for voters to trace responsibility for particular expenditures back to the President, it may not pay the President to target based on their anticipated direct reactions. Plainly it is not easy for ordinary voters to sort out exactly what the President has and has not done. Usually a multitude of public officials and private groups claim credit for each governmental action or inaction. The scope of federal spending is so vast that even the most dedicated voter would not be able to comprehend it in detail in its entirety (cf. Bureau of the Census 1984-90). The fact that a large amount of federal spending reaches voters indirectly further complicates the tracing task. A lot of spending is passed through State governments, for example, often with each State supplementing the federal amount. Sometimes the level of federal spending is pegged to the amount of State spending, as in the case of matching requirements in grants for transportation construction. A voter who tried to measure the President's unique contribution across the full range of LFEs would face an impossible task.
It may be more effective for the President to target spending to appeal to the elites who have interests in each local area, and who control resources that can help or harm the President's reelection chances. It is such local elites who file for projects (``from Alabama to Alaska,'' as Tip O'Neill said). Such local elites are more capable than ordinary voters of knowing both where money is being spent and where money is not being spent when it might have been (Haider 1974). Such local elites can trace responsibility for particular spending decisions back to the President.
Especially because of credibility problems, actions to target spending may be
undertaken either early or late in the President's term. If the plan is to
reach voters and voters are prospective, then the President's main problem is
to convince voters that after the election he will deliver the amounts of LFEs
they prefer. Mere promising is likely not to be sufficient, for the
challenger can make promises as well (Downs 1957; Fiorina 1981). The only
thing the President can do that the challenger cannot do is to target some
LFEs before the election, and to do so in a highly visible
way.
An appeal to retrospective voters will almost certainly require
targeting actions late in the term, but may require efforts earlier on as
well.
If the plan is to appeal to local elites, then the President has not only to answer concerns elites may have about his credibility, but also to find a way to ensure that the local elites in fact do work on his behalf. At least in the aggregate, the President can verify directly how strongly voters in a locality have supported him, simply by counting the votes cast in his favor. But the effort local elites exert on his behalf is only imperfectly observable. This situation in which local elites must fear presidential shirking after the election while the President has to worry about elites slacking off during the campaign is more complicated than the situation studied formally by Baron (1989). But Baron's analysis nonetheless suggests that some LFE targeting will occur before the election, to signal local elites regarding the President's commitment and skill, even if the bulk of the targeting--the actual delivery of the payoffs the President promised--takes place afterward. [see also Levitt 1995, Levitt and Snyder 1997]
An effective way for the President to deliver targeted post-election benefits is to appoint specially chosen local elites to positions in which they will have some discretion over how LFEs are geographically distributed. We call this patronage delegation. The President delegates to appointees the job of learning which LFEs will most benefit the President. The President can expect an appointee to be both especially knowledgeable about the local areas with which he or she is most strongly connected, and especially interested in directing LFE benefits to those areas. Good appointments may allow the President to exploit such knowledge and interest in delivering LFE rewards to those who supported him because they expected to receive direct patronage: access to the White House and privileged positions in the competition for government contracts and grants (Tolchin and Tolchin 1971).
How can the President make such good appointments? After the election, the White House is inundated with requests for appointments from those who worked during the campaign (Macy, Adams and Walter 1983, 48-49). Each candidate needs a rule for making appointments that encourages local elites to exert their maximum possible efforts in the most useful way during the campaign. The effort each local elite exerted during the campaign may be imperfectly observable, but the maximum effort the elite was capable of exerting is not observable by the candidate at all. So each candidate needs to choose a rule, based on observable information, that leads each local elite to act on the private information each has about his or her own capacity, in the way that most helps the candidate's election chances.
Each candidate would like local elites to work where they think their effort will
convert a probable loss into a probable win. To encourage this, those who
convert a pre-election expectation of 
into a election-day result of
ought to have the highest probability of getting an appointment.
To observe increases in support, each candidate must be able to measure the
level of support he has in each local area before the campaign period begins.
It is reasonable to assume that focused opinion polling and other sources give
the major candidates fairly accurate information about such levels.
A downside of such a converted-loss approach is that the President
cannot be confident that the local elites he appoints will share his policy goals.
Voting in presidential elections is strongly partisan. Elites who would be
most effective in mobilizing votes in a candidate's geographic areas of
strongest support are likely to endorse at least the broad, partisan outlines
of the candidate's policy preferences. But local areas that can be converted
from to are likely to be areas in which many voters do
not identify with either party and are weakly committed to the core policy
stands of any candidate. The elites who can best swing voters in such areas
to support a particular candidate may not be the elites most strongly aligned
with that candidate's policy commitments.
Appropriate procedures for screening and for defining the authority appointees
will have can substantially reduce this defect in the converted-loss
approach. Calvert, McCubbins
and Weingast (1989) show that under a wide variety of conditions an
appointee's decisions will be constrained to lie in a region bounded by the
President's and the Congress's goals. So local elites ought not exert
campaign effort for a candidate whose policy goals--including especially
preferences for spending--are very different from their own, if they expect
that candidate to use effective screening and review procedures. Seriously
discrepant local elites ought to anticipate that they will not receive
appointments, or that the President's central organization (e.g., the Office
of Management and Budget [OMB]) will veto their efforts to implement their
preferred spending patterns. A converted-loss approach coupled with screening
and review can therefore give the President appointees who worked as
effectively as they could to support his election, and who support his
preferences for the distribution of LFEs as closely as possible given the
preferences and powers of the Congress.
But if each elite-appointee has information superior to the President's (and the Congress's) about the capacity or tastes for LFEs in at least one local area, then there will be an element of uncertainty that increases each appointee's discretion in making spending decisions (Calvert, McCubbins and Weingast 1989, 597). Local elites who secure appointments can use this discretion to extract the rewards that presumably motivated them to work for the winning candidate in the first place--e.g., extra LFEs being directed to the local areas the elites are associated with. Being a patron-delegate may be a good way to ensure that one receives one's share of direct patronage. If an appointed local elite has only a small informational advantage over the President's central monitor (such as OMB, Pfiffner 1979), then the amount targeted through such discretion will be small relative to the total amount of expenditure over which the elite has authority (compare Chubb 1985).