Hillary Clinton and Democratic supporters are launching $23.3 million worth of TV advertising buys in battleground states, NBC reported Monday. As for planned spending by pro-Donald Trump forces in the same states? $0.
Clinton and her allies are outspending Trump in the battleground states of Iowa, Florida, Colorado, Nevada, New Hampshire, Virginia, North Carolina and Ohio. These are among the states that were contested closely in the 2012 election. President Obama won all of them but North Carolina.
Couple that with Clinton’s 12-point lead in a recent Bloomberg national poll, and her multimillion dollar ad blitz has the Trump camp scrambling for a response.
“We have to have help,” Trump said at a rally in Las Vegas on Friday. “Otherwise I’ll just keep doing what I’m doing. I’ll just keep funding my own campaign.”
A day later, the Trump campaign sent an emergency fundraising email seeking to raise $100,000 by the end of the day for TV ad buys to stop Clinton.
“Crooked Hillary is about to invade your TV with ads attacking Mr. Trump. But we’re preparing to fight back,” the email reads.
Trump spent the weekend “playing catch-up,” as NBC News’s Peter Alexander described, setting his fundraising sights in Texas, a state that hasn’t turned blue in 40 years.
The presumptive GOP nominee’s divisive rhetoric has ruptured the Republican party, distressing billionaire donors like the Koch brothers. Koch Industries spokesman Kenneth Spain told Bloomberg Politics that neither of the conservative donors will support the party’s convention, despite David Koch’s large contributions in 2012.
Here’s more:
Trump has talked up party unity since the Republican primary wound down, with the candidate attempting to build relationships with House speaker Paul Ryan and other key GOP leaders in Washington. The Republican National Committee has also trained its sights on defeating Hillary Clinton as it has stuck by its party’s new standard-bearer.
But Trump has also contended that a lack of unity wouldn’t necessarily hold him back.
“I can win one way or the other,” he told NBC.
Lindsey Curnutte is a Fund for American Studies intern at THE WEEKLY STANDARD and a junior at Ohio University.
