The 2020 presidential campaign advertising war is in full swing, putting millions of dollars behind messaging and targeting strategies for both President Trump and Joe Biden.
Biden’s campaign on Thursday announced that it would start a $15 million, five-week advertising blitz targeting swing states. It is the first major ad spending effort for Biden of his campaign, and the spend will target all advertising platforms — television, digital, radio, and print.
The major paid media buy comes just one day after an Associated Press report, flaunted by the Biden campaign, found that the Trump campaign’s multimillion-dollar paid advertising efforts through the spring have done little to boost his favorability ratings or poll numbers.
Trump’s campaign spent a whopping $24 million on paid advertising that targeted swing states for a seven-week period from the end of April to the first week of June. Last week, it launched another $10 million ad campaign to highlight favorable job numbers.
The content of the ads reflects each campaign’s messaging strategy. While Biden aims to make the election a referendum on Trump, the president’s ads work to make voters view the election more as a choice between the two candidates.
One Biden ad paints Trump as unequipped to lead the country through a pandemic, economic collapse, and civil unrest over policing and race relations and presents Biden as an experienced, stable alternative.
“The ads feature Biden in his own voice. A voice of clarity and moral authority that the country desperately needs,” said Patrick Bonsignore, director of paid media for the Biden campaign. “The audio is pulled from his searing address on this moment in history from Philadelphia, the birthplace of our nation. It was an address that Donald Trump could never give.”
Two recent Trump ads, on the other hand, define Biden as an establishment insider who supported policies that enabled China while destroying American manufacturing and as a politician who is afraid to stand up to far-left fringe movements.
“A lot of Americans know of Joe Biden, but not very many know about Joe Biden,” Trump campaign communications director Tim Murtaugh told the Associated Press. “Right now, in most voters’ minds, he is essentially the generic Democrat. We’re going to change that.”
But more than messaging, the ad spends reveal the crux of each campaign’s electoral targeting strategy.
Biden is targeting the six most-watched 2020 swing states that Trump won in 2016 with digital and television advertisements: Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Michigan, North Carolina, Florida, and Arizona. Those in Florida and Arizona will also feature Spanish-language ads. Trump is also targeting those states.
Notably, Biden’s ads are absent from two states that Trump’s campaign is targeting: Ohio and Iowa, where Trump comfortably won in 2016.
Biden is also not advertising in Georgia or Texas, two traditionally Republican states that Democrats often talk about flipping. In a May press briefing on campaign strategy, the Biden team classified the two states, along with Arizona, as traditionally Republican states where Democrats could “expand” and be in play.
The new Biden ad spend also excludes traditional Democratic states that, according to the press briefing, it seeks to “defend”: Minnesota, Nevada, Colorado, New Hampshire, and Virginia.
“While the Trump campaign has invested millions of dollars to shore up his base with negative ad after negative ad in states he won in 2016, these ads offer the positive case for Joe Biden and reflect a campaign-wide strategy that sets out to create multiple pathways to 270 electoral votes with an expansive map, highlighting states like Arizona and North Carolina,” a Biden campaign press release said Thursday.
