Donald Trump’s presidential campaign has expanded its advertising budget in key battleground states by $1 million one month before Election Day, campaign spokesman Jason Miller announced on Friday.
While ad spending levels in each battleground state will remain roughly the same, the campaign has begun shifting existing ad buys to alternative media markets in crucial swing states like Florida, Ohio and North Carolina, where Trump and Hillary Clinton are running neck-and-neck.
“We are not pulling ads out of the battleground states, that’s absolutely ridiculous,” a source within the campaign told the Washington Examiner, responding to an earlier report that Trump’s team was planning to cancel “hundreds of thousands of dollars in advertising” in at least three battleground states.
“We’ve been analyzing the data every day and are putting our message where it needs to be,” the source explained.
According to one ad tracker, the Trump campaign will withdraw ad buys beginning Monday from certain markets in Pennsylvania, Florida, North Carolina, Iowa, Colorado, Maine, New Hampshire and Ohio.
New battleground state polls released this week showed Clinton making up some of the ground she had lost in Ohio and Florida, suggesting her winning performance in the first presidential debate may have given her a slight bump. Meanwhile, a Boston Globe survey of New Hampshire showed Trump closing the gap between himself and the former secretary of state among voters in the Granite State.
The ad adjustments come just over a week after the Trump campaign announced its $140 million ad buy through Election Day, including $100 million in television airtime and $40 million in digital ads. Clinton and her allies have consistently outspent the GOP nominee on overall paid advertising this cycle.
