With polls showing former President Donald Trump slipping behind Vice President Harris in multiple states, Trump's allies are stepping on the gas to try to make up ground, according to a new NPR analysis of ad data provided in partnership with the ad-tracking firm AdImpact.
Trump's campaign and outside groups supporting him — call them Team Trump — are now outspending Team Harris in four of the seven swing states. That represents a sharp turnaround from earlier in the campaign when President Biden was dominating the airwaves.
Trump's campaign has said a spending surge was always in the plans for around the time of both political conventions. But the increase includes states like North Carolina that previously leaned in Trump's direction. Trump's allies spent little there before Harris entered the race. New investments there show how things have moved.
Pennsylvania is, by far, the state with the most significant ad spending in the past month, with almost $100 million in total. That figure is 54% more than the next closest state, Michigan.
All included, however, when considering national advertising and nonstate-specific digital advertising, Team Harris has outspent Team Trump in the past month by more than $50 million — $246.3 million to $192 million.
That's largely because of Harris' spending during the Olympics as well as her domination online. On digital, Team Harris has spent about $72 million compared with Trump's $16 million. Younger voters take in more of their information online, and they certainly represent a critical piece of Harris' potential base.
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Overall, so far since the beginning of this presidential cycle, more than $1.6 billion has either been spent on ads that have already run or been booked through Election Day. Democrats have spent $882 million to Republicans' $721 million.
About $1.2 billion has been spent on ads that have run already, with the parties about evenly divided.
The race to define Harris
Views were not solidified about Harris when she entered the race. So it's perhaps not surprising then that the most run ads have all been about trying to define who she is.
In total, the top five most aired ads in the past month have been all about Harris and add up to nearly $100 million.
Democrats are putting forward gauzy ads focused on her biography.
Fact-checking the ads
The ad that has aired the most — more than 45,000 times — is from Harris' campaign and is heavy on her background. It echoes her convention speech, portraying her as growing up working class, saying she was raised by her mom and pointing out that she worked at McDonald's. It then pivots to health care and housing costs while criticizing Trump for his tax cuts that it says skewed toward benefiting the wealthy.
The ad with the most money behind it — $25 million — is an anti-Harris ad from a super PAC supporting Trump, Make America Great Again Inc. It attacks her on her record on handling immigrants in the U.S. illegally, during her time as a prosecutor.
But a charge in the ad, while it has a kernel of truth, is misleading. Her office convicted Edwin Ramos, a member of the MS-13 gang, for the murder of a father and two sons. Ramos is now serving three consecutive life sentences. Following through on a campaign promise, Harris did not seek the death penalty, a decision that conservatives have criticized.
The ad also alleges that Harris "let" Ramos "go" on another crime before he committed the murders. The facts on this are complicated. Ramos had been pulled over for illegally tinted windows and no front license plate. The passenger in the car, Erik Lopez, got out and ran. Police saw Lopez toss a gun into a gutter. Both men were arrested. But Harris did not bring charges against Ramos because, as the San Francisco Chronicle reported per Harris' office, "there was no evidence that Ramos had known that Lopez had a gun."
Despite his immigration status, Ramos was not turned over to federal authorities because of San Francisco's policy of being a "sanctuary city." But at the time, Harris opposed the city's policy of not turning juveniles in the country illegally over to federal authorities. Ironically, she had to contend with criticism from the left on this in the 2020 Democratic presidential primary.
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