The Democrat’s fundraising gusher has enabled a national ad strategy that’s helped put reach states in play.
The disparity isn’t just limited to the Monday Night Football game or to Arizona, a once reliably Republican state that’s now a hotly contested battleground. It’s playing out across the dial on TV sets nationwide in the broader presidential campaign. Biden is saturating the airwaves and outgunning his opponent by a margin of about $178 million in ad buys from June 1 through Election Day, according to data from the media-tracking firm Advertising Analytics.
Beyond the messages that both sides relay in their commercials, the ad buys themselves tell the story of the state of the presidential race — particularly the way that the Biden campaign deployed freighter-loads of cash to gain an advantage over Trump in national and many battleground polls.
“What Biden’s campaign is doing is pretty unique,” said John Link, vice president of Advertising Analytics, which provided the data for this story.
“They have been able to run a fully funded campaign in a broad array of swing states, while also expanding to national buys allowing them to expand their reach without sacrificing attention to key states and potentially saving money,” Link said.
Of the $421 million Biden has spent and reserved on TV, a higher portion than usual for campaigns — 15 percent — is on nationwide cable and broadcast TV programs seen by the nation’s 208 local markets, whether they’re in a swing state like Arizona, a blue state like Massachusetts or a red state like Idaho.
Biden’s national buys are seen as a key ingredient in making former swing states like Ohio and Iowa look like battlegrounds again. The campaign is advertising heavily on shows such as Wheel of Fortune and Jeopardy, which are popular among seniors, and older people especially are watching more TV during the pandemic.
Normally, presidential campaigns prefer a targeted approach of buying ads in local markets in battleground states, with relatively few national buys. That usually means presidential campaigns, in effect, are running 10 or fewer related statewide races.
But in late spring, Biden’s campaign saw the map starting to expand in his favor, with as many as 17 states in play. Trump’s standing in polls were plummeting over his handling of coronavirus while historic sums of campaign donations began flooding into the Democrat’s coffers.
https://www.politico.com/news/2020/10/18/biden-trump-television-advertisements-430011