Joe Biden’s presidential campaign announced Wednesday that they’ve made the single largest ad buy in presidential campaign history, pouring an estimated $220 million into television spots with another $60 million earmarked for digital and social media advertising.
CBS News notes that that’s the largest ad buy ever by a presidential candidate, and it appears Biden is intent on blanketing the airwaves in at least 15 states, many of which are considered “battleground states” where Biden currently leads President Donald Trump by a slight margin.
The Hill reports that the ad buy is a “red state media blitz” that will run for 90 days ahead of the November election, and they’re trying to learn from Hillary Clinton’s mistakes in 2016, focusing on traditionally “red” and even marginally “blue” states, and assuming that a Democratic win isn’t all but guaranteed in places like Michigan, Wisconsin, Colorado, and Nevada.
“The Biden campaign will continue running ads in the six core battleground states of Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, North Carolina, Arizona, and Florida,” The Hill notes. “They’ve also made reservations in states that Hillary Clinton won in 2016, including Minnesota, Nevada, New Hampshire, Colorado, and Virginia.”
The idea, aides say, is to give Biden several options — and several paths to victory — inside the Electoral College.
The Biden campaign is also taking a different tack toward advertising than Clinton’s 2016 effort, refusing, in some cases, to address Trump directly. Instead of attacking the president, Biden’s plan is a television ad where he addresses voters himself, “speaking directly to [the] camera about the response to the COVID-19 pandemic and the resulting economic fall.”
The ads will also be longer than traditional political ads, running for a full 60 seconds in some spots rather than the traditional 30 seconds. On some networks, that may mean that the former vice president will be on screen for an entire commercial break.
Biden’s team say they hope the strategy draws a “stark contrast with an almost exclusively negative attack campaign that the Trump campaign has decided to unleash.”
Trump is already on the airwaves in most states — even in blue states where the president isn’t expected to win — with a laser-like focus on Florida, where the president is struggling but still inside the margin of error in most polls. Florida is considered a must-win state for Trump if he intends to keep the White House. The campaign is also giving significant attention to places like Georgia, North Carolina, and Arizona — states that have shifted toward Democrats in the last four years.
“The Trump campaign has currently reserved $147.7 million in television advertising buys across 11 battleground states beginning in September, through the general election, according to Kantar/CMAG data,” CBS says. “More than a quarter of the advance bookings zero in on Florida, as of now.”