Trump campaign to launch new TV ads in Arizona

President Donald Trump’s campaign media strategy is re-emphasizing Arizona as one of four key early voting states targeted with new television commercials.

Voters in Arizona, North Carolina, Georgia and Florida can expect to see new TV ads on local broadcast and cable television networks in support of Trump’s re-election. Bill Stepien, Trump 2020 campaign manager, told reporters during a telephone news conference Monday that the states were chosen because of the “staggered nature of their voting patterns.”

“We are up in running two new ads in four key states, which are wisely targeted and wisely focused on those states that will beginning their voting the earliest in the country,” Stepien said during the press conference.

According to a Trump news release issued Monday, “the campaign paused advertising for several days last week while undertaking a review of advertising tactics and has resumed with a smarter, more strategic approach that recognizes the staggered calendar presented in the 2020 election.”

For his part, former Vice President Joe Biden, Trump’s Democratic challenger, is bolstering his campaign staff in Texas, which, like Arizona, is a traditional presidential red state.

At a virtual fundraiser Monday, Biden cited 17 battleground states and vowed “to keep campaigning as aggressively as possible” because “we’re going to need as many pathways to victory as we’re going to get,” per a Biden campaign pool report from the event. He mentioned spending $45 million since mid-June in strategic states for television and digital advertisements, the pool report said.

Polls have shown Biden leading

Trump in Arizona.

“We’re connecting with voters in every way — phone, text, email and online,” Biden said at the virtual event, per the pool report. “None of us — not you, not me — can take our foot off the gas.”

Arizonans have already taken to early voting: in the 2016 presidential election, 75% of people who voted in Arizona used an early, mail or absentee ballot.

This year, early voting begins Oct. 7 in Arizona, two days after the state’s voter registration deadline.

The first day to request a mail in ballot for the general election was Aug. 2. The final day to do so in Arizona is Oct. 23.

Despite the Trump campaign’s efforts to target early voters, Trump has repeatedly claimed, without evidence, that mail-in voting leads to fraud.

One of the new TV ads, “Cards,” is aimed at what the Trump campaign dubs the “silent majority,” a group of voters that the campaign says is undercounted by national polls.