How Biden destroyed Trump's TV ad 'death star'

[brooklynite]

Politico

Football fans in Phoenix will tune their TVs to ESPN to watch their Arizona Cardinals play the Dallas Cowboys on Monday night.

They’ll also see Joe Biden running up the score in advertising over President Donald Trump: The Democrat’s campaign is spending nearly $400,000 for three TV spots during the game. Two of them will air locally in the massive Phoenix market — which has more political ads than anywhere else in the nation — and the third will be shown nationally.

Trump is spending just $36,000 on one local spot during the game.

The disparity isn’t just limited to the "Monday Night Football" game or to Arizona, a once reliably Republican state that’s now a hotly contested battleground. It’s playing out across the dial on TV sets nationwide in the broader presidential campaign. Biden is saturating the airwaves and outgunning his opponent by a margin of about $178 million in ad buys from June 1 through Election Day, according to data from the media-tracking firm Advertising Analytics.

Beyond the messages that both sides relay in their commercials, the ad buys themselves tell the story of the state of the presidential race — particularly the way that the Biden campaign deployed freighter-loads of cash to gain an advantage over Trump in national and many battleground polls.

[Enterstageleft]

1. Oh Biden-wa...You're our only hope...

[gratuitous]

2. One local spot?

Perhaps the rumors are true, and the Trump campaign is running on fumes, money-wise.

[Gothmog]

3. Trump is losing, and his campaign doesn't want the blame

This makes me smile https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2020/10/17/1987272/-Trump-s-campaign-is-already-playing-the-blame-game-but-they-suck-as-much-as-their-candidate

Trump doesn’t surround himself with competence. It is literally baked into his management style—he doesn’t want anyone that will upstage him in any way. Thus he somehow manages to find people even more stupid and corrupt than he, and then puts them in charge. It’s no accident that dozens of his associates are in prison or indicted.

That has certainly been the case with Trump’s campaign managers this year. He started with Brad Parscale, who promptly went from pauper to luxury cars and multiple homes. There’s no sadness when grifters grift other grifters, but Parscale didn’t get fired for syphoning millions of Republican donor dollars into his own pockets. He didn't even get fired for rank stupidity, like this famously mocked Tweet:

Link to tweet

.....So this is REALLY weird. The campaign is certainly acting like it’s broke, canceling ad campaigns in critical battleground states. And while Biden crushed Trump in September fundraising, the Trump campaign still raised $248 million. There are two weeks and change left in the campaign. A quarter billion dollars should be enough. But … they’re still acting as though they have nothing left in the bank. So what exactly is going on here?

My suspicion is that they’re simply lying about the amount raised. Yes, it would be a federal violation of law to lie about their fundraising, but ha ha ha as if they care! In fact, we know that Trump’s favorite thing to lie about is his money! And what’s the consequence of the campaign admitting they lied about fundraising after the election? Nothing. Slap on the wrist? A million-dollar fine that the campaign will never pay, because fuck you, Trump doesn’t give a shit?

The other possibility is that Stepien has his own Parscale-level grift happening. Maybe he's in it with the whole Trump family! Donald owes his $400 million with little chance of earning that money honestly, so why not save campaign cash to save the family business? They’ve gotten away with worse in the past.

[moonscape]

4. Great read. Thanks! n/t