A billboard displays an advertisement for Democratic presidential nominee Vice-President Kamala Harris on the Las Vegas Strip on Aug. 23.Julia Nikhinson/The Associated Press
There’s a TV ad from Kamala Harris’s campaign that starts out with an unfamiliar version of the Democratic presidential candidate: tiny and chubby-cheeked, shown in grainy old photos both alone and alongside her mom.
“When you’re raised by an immigrant mother, you learn what’s possible with determination,” the narration says. “And determination is how Kamala Harris went from working at McDonald’s to prosecutor, state attorney-general, U.S. senator, and our Vice-President in only one generation.”
Other voices talk about how she defends “our families” against pharmaceutical giants, corporations that try to gouge on rent and groceries, violent criminals and those who would take away reproductive freedom. All of the narrators speak in accented English and most of the people who appear on screen in campaign-trail footage are racialized. The whole ad feels warmly conspiratorial, like a friend or neighbour is telling you the real deal.
There’s a very different cast to a Trump campaign ad in which a female narrator says that Ms. Harris wants to tax service-workers’ tips. An army of grey-suited, briefcase-toting clones marches into a house past a frightened-looking young woman, and a merrily threatening soundtrack plays as they root through her drawers, bedrooms and couch cushions.
Near the end of the ad, energetic string music kicks in and the voiceover touts Donald Trump’s plan to end taxes on tips, over slow-panned photos of the candidate, looking like he’s carved out of granite.
“President Trump. He’s on your side,” the narrator concludes. (Ms. Harris in fact has a similar no-taxes-on-tips policy.)
These ads obviously seek to appeal to immigrant families and service workers, respectively. But all of the advertising deluging Americans during this year’s presidential race is like one of those mosaic images made up of thousands of tiny individual photos that together create a larger composite picture. If you squint hard at the thumbnails, they reveal where the campaigns see opportunity or risk, whom they believe their persuadable voters to be and what messages might capture them.
This presidential race may be historically tight and appears to be calcifying along coin-toss margins in both national polling and the handful of swing states that will likely decide the whole thing.
This campaign also represents the largest firehose of money ever sprayed at an electorate during a presidential election. The Harris campaign alone has raised US$1-billion in the three months since she became the nominee, while the Trump campaign announced that it had raised US$130-million in August and US$160-million in September.
As a result of their heftier fundraising, the Democrats have consistently outspent the Trump campaign by wide margins on both digital and TV advertising.
On Facebook and Instagram, the Democratic campaign bought more advertising than the Republicans by a 10:1 ratio between September, 2023 and August, 2024, according to a new report from the ElectionGraph research project from Syracuse University’s Institute for Democracy, Journalism and Citizenship. On the chart that tracks the campaigns’ online ad spending, the blue Democratic line shoots up like a rocket in late July, when Ms. Harris took over the ticket.
Both camps are pouring this advertising into battleground states, of course. But Trump campaign advertising has focused more on Georgia, Arizona and North Carolina, while the Harris-Walz ticket has fixated on Michigan and Wisconsin, the research finds.
The Democratic campaign has also lavished 12 times more money than the Republicans on Pennsylvania, which is locked in a polling dead heat and is home to 19 electoral-college votes that represent a huge prize in the race to the White House.
“We know that TV ads are still a key area where candidates are spending a lot of money,” said Jennifer Stromer-Galley, a professor at Syracuse University who specializes in political campaigns and misinformation, and who was the lead researcher on the ElectionGraph research project. “But starting in 2016, and then especially in 2020, we saw that the presidential candidates really increased the amount of money that they spent on digital advertising.”
Online ads allow for pinpoint targeting, and examining that information allows Prof. Stromer-Galley and her colleagues to see which eyeballs each campaign is chasing. The Trump campaign goes after older voters, while the Harris campaign chases younger and middle-aged ones, they found. The Republicans target more men and the Democrats more women.
Spending on TV in this campaign suggests that the medium is far from passé. According to AdImpact, which tracks campaign spending on TV advertising, between July 22 – the day after President Joe Biden dropped out of the race – and Oct. 8, US$1-billion in ads wallpapered the seven battleground states (Pennsylvania, Michigan, Georgia, Wisconsin, Arizona, North Carolina and Nevada). Make-or-break Pennsylvania was the target of 21 per cent of that money.
Both before and since Mr. Biden dropped out, the Democrats have consistently outspent the Republicans on TV, though by smaller margins – a nearly 2:1 ratio, according to AdImpact – than the differential in digital ads.
The most-used TV ad from the Democrats – aired 34,000 times as of Oct. 8, and concentrated in Pennsylvania, Michigan and Georgia – uses a snippet of Ms. Harris’s speech at the Democratic National Convention to make the case that the president should be in it for the public and not themselves. “As a prosecutor, I never asked a victim or a witness, ‘Are you a Republican or a Democrat?’ The only thing I ever asked them: ‘Are you okay?’ ” Ms. Harris says.
The Trump campaign’s most-aired ad – shown 27,000 times, focusing on Georgia, North Carolina and Michigan, according to AdImpact – is set up as a “Harris vs. Harris” mock debate. Accompanied by cartoony music, the ad juxtaposes Ms. Harris talking about inflationary economic pain with other moments when she praised the effectiveness of Bidenomics, the current administration’s economic blueprint.
The real prize in this election is the tiny proportion of undecideds. External advocacy groups sometimes lean explicitly on identity to try to appeal to these people, as with the grassroots organization White Dudes for Harris, which unveiled a $10-million ad buy in September.
The ad feels like a beer commercial. A narrator says he has realized that “it isn’t about picking teams,” and the Harris-Walz ticket will make life better for him and his family.
“They’re actually talkin’ to guys like us,” he says. “No lectures. No BS.”
It’s a cheerfully belligerent permission slip – voting for the Democrats isn’t weak, it’s smart – aimed at the white men who have leaned heavily Republican under Mr. Trump.
Beyond the content of the ads themselves, the eye-watering amounts of money involved and the firepower it buys form their own proxy war.
At the beginning of September, the Harris campaign issued a memo that touted US$170-million in TV-ad reservations the campaign made through to election day, along with US$200-million that it called “the largest digital reservation in the history of American politics.”
In digital, the Harris-Walz camp was focused on streaming platforms such as Hulu, YouTube, Paramount+ and Spotify, all in service of a strategy to “surround voters” wherever they could be found in a fragmented media environment.
What those constituencies hear from the campaigns themselves is only one part of the story told to voters. Myriad super PACs (a species of political action committee that can raise unlimited funds to advocate for a particular issue or partisan side) and advocacy groups have launched their own ads, often with distinct message tracks from those of the campaigns. The most powerful super PAC that supports Ms. Harris’s campaign has reportedly sprayed around its own US$700-million in advertising.
Since Mr. Biden dropped out, Trump campaign ads have focused squarely on the wallet by talking about inflation (62 per cent), the economy (53 per cent) and housing (31 per cent), according to AdImpact. For Republican Super PACs, however, the big focus is how unsafe life feels, with ads focused on immigration (71 per cent), crime (67 per cent) and illegal drugs (22 per cent).
But at one point, the Trump campaign and MAGA Inc. – the major super PAC supporting Mr. Trump – released two different ads that took their own paths to end up at nearly identical taglines. The super PAC’s version focused on dangerous criminals purportedly streaming across the border, before pivoting to the idea that Ms. Harris supported transgender surgery for prisoners – factually, a muddy concept at best – while the Trump campaign’s ad was festooned with images of drag queens.
Both ads ended with the same bottom line: “Kamala is for they/them. President Trump is for you.”
Whoever “you” are, if you can cast a vote, there’s an ad searching for your eyeballs.