State is a top Trump-Biden battleground, based on ads
If you want to know where the Trump and Biden campaigns and their allies think the 2020 race for president will be decided, their TV spending is a pretty good guide.
Four states — Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Florida — accounted for 13 of the top 15 TV markets in the presidential ad wars between Donald Trump and Joe Biden during a sevenweek period in May and June, according to a recent analysis of broadcast advertising by the Wesleyan Media Project.
Arizona and North Carolina accounted for the other two.
These rankings will fluctuate between now and November.
But those are the six states that are most likely to elect the next president, and the ones most likely to see the greatest campaign activity.
Three Wisconsin markets were among the top 10 advertising hot spots nationally: Green Bay at No. 2, La Crosse at No. 6 and Milwaukee at No. 9. (Wausau ranked 21st).
Grand Rapids, Michigan, was No. 1. Harrisburg and Wilkes-Barre in Pennsylvania were third and fourth, while Phoenix, Arizona, was fifth, measured by the number of presidential campaign spots aired in each TV market.
As a snapshot of the 2020 air wars, the Wesleyan report not only points to where the battle is being waged this time, it’s also a window into how the presidential playing field has changed over the past two decades.
Compare Wesleyan’s list of top advertising targets in May and June of 2020 to the advertising hot spots in the George W. Bush-John Kerry race back in 2004, the last time a Republican president was running for reelection.
Only two media markets make the top 10 on both lists (2004 and 2020), and they’re both in Wisconsin: Green Bay and Milwaukee.
Seven others make the top 20 on both lists: La Crosse, Pittsburgh, Philadelphia, Miami, Tampa-St. Pete, Orlando and Wilkes-Barre.
When comparing the states that mattered most 16 years ago with the states that matter most today, Wisconsin, Florida and Pennsylvania are the great constants.
In 2004, Bush “had to win Florida and either Wisconsin or Ohio, and the advertising tells that story,” said Ken Goldstein, a political scientist with the University of San Francisco and former president of Kantar Media CMAG, a company that tracks political advertising. (The 2004 ad data cited in this story was gathered by Goldstein when he was at the University of Wisconsin-Madison).
Ohio leads the list of states that mattered hugely 16 years ago but a good deal less today.
Cleveland, Toledo and Columbus were all top 10 markets in the Bush-Kerry ad wars. Now Ohio is too Republican to be a premier battleground. Iowa is a similar case. The Trump campaign has been advertising in Ohio because it is struggling in even some GOPleaning states. But in Wesleyan’s list of 2020 hot spots, no Ohio market ranked in the top 30.
Nevada was home to two top 10 markets in 2004, Reno and Las Vegas. Nevada is still competitive but leans a bit too Democratic to matter quite as much as it did in 2004. Las Vegas ranked 30th on the recent list of advertising hot spots.
Albuquerque, New Mexico, was the No. 6 target for TV ads in the Bush-Kerry race. Like Wisconsin, New Mexico was decided by less than a point in 2000 and 2004. But unlike Wisconsin, it’s no longer that relevant to the battle over the presidency. It’s become too Democratic.
Eugene, Portland and Medford, Oregon, all saw presidential advertising in 2004. So did Denver, Colorado, Seattle, Washington, and Kansas City and St. Louis in Missouri.
These weren’t all essential states back then, but they were battlegrounds very broadly defined. They saw no presidential ads in the 2020 window that Wesleyan recently tracked. Oregon, Washington and Colorado are now considered much too Democratic to be difference-makers. Missouri is far too Republican.
At the same time, some states are relevant today than they were back then.
Michigan was viewed as a little too Democraticleaning to be a top-five or top-six battleground in 2004. Grand Rapids ranked 31st as an ad target in that race. Flint was 38th, Lansing was 39th and Detroit was 45th.
But after narrowly voting for Trump in 2016, Michigan
is now a first-rank electoral target, accounting for four of the top 15 TV markets in the Trump-Biden race during May and June.
Arizona, once safely Republican but now quite purple, has made a huge leap in importance. Phoenix was the No. 48 ad target in the 2004 Bush-Kerry race. It was the No. 5 ad target in May and June.
North Carolina has also ascended. Charlotte was the No. 85 ad target in 2004. It ranked 14th in Wesleyan’s 2020 study. This year, North Carolina is exceeded in importance only by Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Florida and Arizona.
In 2004, “it was really about Ohio, Pennsylvania, Florida and Wisconsin,” Goldstein said. This time around, “Pennsylvania, Florida, Wisconsin, Michigan and Arizona all matter,” he said.
The list of 2020 targets will vary a bit over the remainder of the campaign.
Biden hadn’t really ramped up his advertising in May and June and was dramatically outspent by Trump. He and Democratic groups were airing relatively few ads in Florida during this period.
As that changes, some TV markets in Florida will likely rise into the top 10. Biden is also now buying air time in Texas for the first time, though his core targets are Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Florida, Arizona and North Carolina.
The logic of this kind of targeting is to focus spending on the states most likely to be difference-makers in a tight electoral contest and try to shift the vote in those states on the margins.
A state such as Iowa or Ohio might be competitive now because the national climate has deteriorated for Trump. But a scenario in which Iowa or Ohio vote for Biden is not a scenario in which the national contest is competitive. Put another way, if Biden is doing well enough to win Iowa and Ohio, then he’s doing well enough not to need them.
That’s why only six or seven states are potentially decisive.
Back in 2004, Wisconsin was the Bush campaign’s insurance policy against losing Ohio. In the end, Ohio was the state that won Bush the presidency. But had Bush lost Ohio, a victory in Wisconsin would have given Bush the election. That math made Wisconsin a top-four state.
Four years ago, Wisconsin was the so-called “tipping point state,” the state that mathematically put Trump over the top in Electoral College. But in one of the great election misfires, the Hillary Clinton campaign ignored Wisconsin (and Michigan) until it was too late. It misread the map.
“Some of what you’re seeing (now) is the hard lessons learned from 2016,” said Erika Franklin Fowler, a political scientist at Wesleyan University and a director of the Wesleyan Media Project.
She was referring to the laser-focus of Biden and allied groups this year on the three Great Lakes battlegrounds (Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania) that voted for Trump four years ago after many years of voting Democratic.
In its handicapping of the 2020 electoral contest, the nonpartisan Cook Political Report rates Wisconsin as the “tipping point state” once again. That doesn’t mean Wisconsin has an equal chance of voting for Trump or Biden. (Right now, Biden is clearly ahead in Wisconsin). It means that it’s the state most likely to decide the outcome if the electoral contest goes down to the wire. Some other analysts rate Pennsylvania as the most likely tipping point state in 2020.
Either way, we have a pretty good notion which states will decide the 2020 election, even if we can’t be certain how they will decide it.
Craig Gilbert has covered every presidential campaign since 1988 and chronicled Wisconsin’s role as a swing state at the center of the nation’s political divide. He has written widely about polarization and voting trends and won distinction for his data-driven analysis. Gilbert has served as a writer-in-residence at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, a Lubar Fellow at Marquette Law School and a Knight-Wallace Fellow at the University of Michigan, where he studied public opinion, survey research, voting behavior and statistics. Email him at craig.gilbert@jrn.com and follow him on Twitter: @WisVoter.