BLOOMBERG SPENDING BIG TO DEFEAT TRUMP
Advertising blitz targets president’s vulnerabilities
WASHINGTON
Hillary Clinton tried. So did 16 rival Republicans. And after hundreds of millions of dollars were spent on ads attacking Donald Trump in 2016, the results were the same: They never did much damage.
Now Michael Bloomberg is trying — his way — spending millions each week in an online advertising onslaught that is guided by polling and data that he and his advisers believe provide unique insight into the president’s vulnerabilities.
The effort, which is targeting seven battleground states where polls show Trump is likely to be competitive in November, is just one piece of an advertising campaign that is unrivaled in scope and scale. On Facebook and Google alone, where Bloomberg is most focused on attacking the president, he has spent $18 million on ads in the last month, according to Acronym, a digital messaging firm that works with Democrats.
That is on top of the $128 million the Bloomberg campaign has spent on television ads, according to Advertising Analytics, an independent firm, which projects that Bloomberg is likely to spend a combined $300 million to $400 million on advertising across all media before the
Super Tuesday primaries in early March.
Those amounts dwarf the ad budgets of his rivals, and he is spending at a faster clip than past presidential campaigns as well. Bloomberg is also already spending more than the Trump campaign each week to reach voters online. And if the $400 million estimate holds, that would be about the same as what President Barack Obama’s campaign spent on advertising over the course of the entire general election in 2012.
The ads amount to a huge bet by the Bloomberg campaign that there are enough Americans who are not too fixed in their opinions of Trump and can be swayed by the ads’ indictment of his conduct and character.
None of these assumptions are safe in a political environment that is increasingly bifurcated along partisan lines and where, for many voters, information from
“the other side” is instantly suspect. But Bloomberg’s aides think it is imperative to flood voters with attacks on the president before it is too late — a lesson Republicans learned in 2016 when they initially spent most of their ad budgets during the primaries tearing into one another while ignoring Trump.
In one new Bloomberg campaign ad, a man from Michigan refers to the spending in the Democratic primary: “All this effort and all this money and none of it goes to help the one election that really matters?” The campaign plans to run the ad online in Super Tuesday primary states.
In swing states like Wisconsin and Pennsylvania that are likely to decide whether Trump gets reelected, ads from the president’s campaign and friendly outside groups have been, for the most part, the only paid messages that voters have seen about him. Bloomberg ’s campaign is focusing its efforts there, hoping to erode Trump’s standing.
“I’ve been telling anyone who will listen, Trump is winning,” said Kevin Sheekey, the campaign manager for Bloomberg, who argued that the lack of anti-trump advertising essentially means “he is running unopposed in swing states.”
In interviews, Bloomberg’s top strategists described how they think they can undermine Trump’s standing with voters who are open to reconsidering their support for him. According to the campaign’s data, this is somewhere between 10 percent to 15 percent of the people who voted for him in 2016.
Bloomberg’s aides say their data generally show that these people tend to express disappointment about promises Trump has failed to keep on issues such as rebuilding the nation’s infrastructure — an especially potent concern in places like Michigan.
In most states, they are upset with the president’s push to repeal the Affordable Care Act without putting forward a Republican alternative, which voters view as jeopardizing their health coverage. They view his response to several mass shootings during his term as lacking urgency and seriousness, particularly in the suburbs around Detroit and Philadelphia, the Bloomberg data show.
Peters writes for The New York Times.