Harris and Trump’s ads reveal the state of the race

With less than a month to go until Election Day, both Kamala Harris and Donald Trump’s campaigns are flooding the swing states with advertising — including programming that tends to be light on politicking, like daytime talk shows and Sunday Night Football. The spending is making both campaigns run through money at a rapid clip: Though the New York Times reported this week that Kamala Harris’s fundraising had hit the $1 billion mark — a staggering sum that, in a two and a half month stretch, has outstripped Trump’s total fundraising this year — her campaign is reportedly worried about cash in the closing weeks. That’s partly because of how much she’s swamped Trump on the air thus far: Harris and the DNC outspent Trump and RNC 2:1 between the Democratic convention and early October, according to a Washington Post analysis.

It’s in keeping with the pattern of the past several presidential elections. Until mid-October 2016, Hillary Clinton’s campaign had outspent the Trump campaign on ads roughly 3:1. Up until the same point in 2020, Joe Biden had outspent Trump on ads roughly 2:1. While Democrats’ sizable spending advantage did not prevent Trump from overperforming expectations, it likely had an impact on the results — especially in 2020, when four states were decided by one percentage point or less.

Now, in the final weeks of an exceedingly close race, both camps’ ad choices provide clues about their different views of the state of the race. A review of the word choice in each provides insight.

Trump’s ads have heavily emphasized rising costs, including gas and housing, while frequently hitting Harris over past comments on issues like fracking.

Harris’s ads are more likely to emphasize health care and the middle class, and tout achievements of the Biden administration, like capping the cost of insulin for Medicare beneficiaries. 

Intriguingly, both parties’ ads have emphasized border security, underscoring just how concerned voters have become about the influx of migrants.

Of course, the data excludes the hundreds of millions being spent by allied groups and super PACs on either side. But the campaigns’ ad decisions, which are usually informed by the most accurate data and up-to-date private polling, have traditionally been considered the most instructive about the state of the race.

The campaigns notably diverge in the degree to which they emphasize their opponent. Following President Biden’s decision to drop out of the race, both sides battled to define the Democrats’ new candidate, spending hundreds of millions on ads overwhelmingly focused on Harris herself. Collectively, the campaigns and their aligned super PACs spent roughly $1.3 billion on advertising between July 22 and October 9, according to a report out this week from AdImpact. The vast majority of the ads bought during that time included positive or negative messaging about Harris, according to AdImpact and a review of FEC filings.

By many measures, Democrats seem to have won the battle to define Harris: Her favorability rating is now nearly dead-even, according to the FiveThirtyEight average. That places her about 10 points better than Trump and is a remarkable turnaround from early July, when she was underwater by 17 points. A Gallup poll out Thursday found further evidence of public goodwill: While she trails Trump on metrics like strength and the ability to get things done, she trounces him on key questions of honesty, likability, and moral character.

But the Trump campaign’s strategy may indicate its internal data finds a harsher view of Harris’s image than public polls suggest: A review of its ads found that nearly 60% contain video of Harris speaking. By comparison, just around 15% of Harris ads contain Trump speaking. That divergence partly reflects the candidates’ vastly different profiles: While Trump has saturated the political and cultural landscapes for nearly a decade, leaving few unaware of his perceived strengths and weaknesses, Harris is far more undefined and her image is far more malleable. Both private and public polling has found that undecided voters in particular want more information about the vice president.

As both campaigns zero in on those voters, the Trump campaign seems to be making a bigger bet: that Harris’s own words are its best line of attack. When she first entered the race, this newsletter emphasized just how much of a liability the vice president’s paper trail from 2020 was. In the two and a half months since, the Trump campaign has done exactly what most observers expected: Take the long list of hard left, sometimes deeply unpopular, stances the vice president took in 2019 and repackage it into an effort to disqualify Harris with undecided voters.

The Trump camp’s most-run ad right now embodies that approach. It is currently placing the most money behind a spot focused on comments Harris made in 2019 touting her efforts to extend publicly funded gender confirmation surgery to inmates in the California prison system. Nearly half the ad — 14 of its 30 seconds — contains Harris herself speaking.

Harris’s appearance on The View, part of an overall media blitz this week, may have provided another opening. Asked where she might differ from Biden, who remains unpopular nationally, Harris responded that “there is not a thing that comes to mind.” She went on to hug her boss even further, saying she’s “been a part of most of the decisions” of the administration. Just hours later, Axios reported that the Trump campaign was already planning to turn the moment into ad content.

That said, Democrats may take heart that Harris is emulating Biden on the air. Her campaign’s decision to focus its ad firepower beyond Trump himself means its presence on the airwaves is far more reminiscent of Biden’s successful 2020 campaign than Clinton’s failed 2016 effort. A review of Biden’s and Clinton’s ads from late July to mid-October (the equivalent time period to the Harris v. Trump campaign) found a wide divergence: While the majority of Clinton ads heavily focused on Trump himself, including spots lauded at the time, Bidens’ largely avoided him, centering his own economic and character messages.

Given some Democrats’ rising worries over a repeat of 2016, it’s a notable difference from that year. If their candidate loses, it won’t be because they ran the same playbook. 

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