The NPR Politics Podcast - Biden Is Dramatically Out-Advertising Donald Trump. So Far.

Episode Date: April 18, 2024

The Biden campaign and allied groups are aggressively advertising to win over persuadable voters. Trump and his affiliates are almost nowhere to be found.This episode: political correspondent Susan Davis, senior White House correspondent Tamara Keith, and senior political editor and correspondent Domenico Montanaro.This podcast was produced by Kelli Wessinger and Casey Morell. Our editor is Eric McDaniel. Our executive producer is Muthoni Muturi. Listen to every episode of the NPR Politics Podcast sponsor-free, unlock access to bonus episodes with more from the NPR Politics team, and support public media when you sign up for The NPR Politics Podcast+ at plus.npr.org/politics.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

Hello, this is Kendall, and I'm currently in Los Nevados National Park in the Paramo of the Andean Mountains in Colombia, searching for the Andean condor, the bird with the largest wingspan in South America. Today's show is recorded at 12.38 p.m. on Thursday, April 18th. Things may have changed by the time you're hearing this, but hopefully I've seen one more bird to add to my life list. Here's the show. Kendall and I are having very different Thursdays.

Yeah, so we are back to the timestamps made to make us jealous. There you go. I'm going to fold some dish towels after this. Hey there, it's the NPR Politics Podcast. I'm Susan Davis. I cover politics. I'm Tamara Keith. I cover the White House.

And I'm Domenico Montanaro, senior political editor and correspondent. And today we're looking at the role campaign ad spending is playing in the presidential race. Domenico, you've been reporting on this. And when it comes to spending, President Biden is just swamping Donald Trump right now. What's the disparity look like? It's a huge difference. I mean, it's not even in the same ballpark. Biden and the group supporting him, we'll call them Team Biden, are spending $23.3 million since Super Tuesday, sort of unofficial

start to the general election. And Trump and allies supporting him, only $4.5 million total. Almost $3 million of that are digital ads run by Save America, an outside group that supports Trump, in asking for more money in digital ads. So just like soliciting ads. Correct. And most of the money from MAGA Inc., which is another super PAC that's supporting him, is going toward cable buys, which doesn't have as broad a reach as broadcast ads do in local markets. And the only ad that has run on local markets in broadcast was just popped up yesterday from MAGA Inc. It focused on immigration. It was in Wilkes-Barre, Scranton area of Pennsylvania. It happens to be where Joe Biden

was campaigning. Where is Trump's money? This is not a politician who has historically had a hard time when it comes to money. He has this cycle, though. I mean, he's going to have enough money, right? I mean, everybody who I talk to, Republican strategists, I say, like, look, this seems to be a decision, a choice that the Trump team is making in why spend money now, because they feel like he has enough celebrity. People know who he is. This is 100% name ID. The Biden campaign is wasting their money, they would say, and the Biden campaign are the ones that need to spend this money. But, you know, he's struggling a bit. I mean, he had been raising significant amounts of money from small donors based around these indictments and the mugshot in Georgia, for example, in Fulton County. He was his single biggest day of fundraising. But that's really

dwindled. The return on investment is dwindled. And there's just a lot of solicitations that they're making. And they're not quite seeing the same return on investment with those small donors and bigger donors who had been supporting, say, Nikki Haley's campaign just aren't flocking toward Trump. Tim, there is maybe a point here in that Trump and his campaign, they get a lot of earned media. In other words, just they get blanketed in media coverage. So you don't necessarily need to buy ads because the message is getting out in other ways. But 2024 is a very different race than 2016. Trump's not, you know, being carried on cable news live for hours at a time. That's right. And he is indoors in a trial, not on television, for hours and hours on end,

four days a week for the foreseeable future because of this trial in New York. Of course, he can hold court outside and he certainly gets some attention for that. But 2024 isn't 2016. The media is approaching him differently. But his campaign insists that Trump is someone who, you know, yep, they're behind in fundraising. They admit it. They hope to catch up. But they're like, yeah, but our guy gets attention just by existing the way he it. News consumption of this race is down. Americans are kind of tuning out these candidates and this campaign in a way they haven't in the past. But you really can't tune out campaign ads in the modern media environment. You know, that's not just television, but they're getting them on digital and social media. And it's probably way more effective for a campaign to sort of target a voter than relying on traditional

media coverage. I spoke with someone at the Biden campaign today about this very thing. And they said that this cycle, they are spending more money on digital than any campaign ever has before. That's not just like an ad on Facebook. That's you're at home watching Abbott Elementary on YouTube TV and all of a sudden you get an ad for Joe Biden if you live in a certain key state or you are part of a certain key demographic that they're trying to persuade. And in fact, the Biden campaign has spent a lot of money on ads during Abbott Elementary, which is this uplifting show that they have come to believe based on piloting that they did in the fall with advertising, it's a show that people who should vote for Joe Biden watch. But maybe those people are looking for escapism. That's why they're watching Abbott Elementary. And the Biden

campaign is coming for them. And what they feel like they need to do is a sustained effort of persuasion from beginning to end. They believe that this election will be decided by a very small number of voters. And those people need to be persuaded to vote for Joe Biden and to vote, period, to get off the couch. And so they're coming for them and they're going to keep coming for them. And they are coming for them in places where they know they are. women, Latinos, Black voters, Latinos and Black voters, especially younger voters, they're really lagging with and they need to fire them up to remind them of those things and to remind them of the kinds of issues that they feel like they're fighting for. So we're seeing a lot of those ads running. At the same time, when you talk about persuasion, I talked to Kevin Madden, who helped run Mitt Romney's campaign in 2012. He was talking about the two different stages of a campaign in advertising. And here's what he had to say.

There's the persuasion stage, and then there's the mobilization stage. At a certain point, your advertising becomes more about mobilization and getting out folks that you've already identified as supporters. There are very few ads that have an impact on persuading voters after Labor Day. Most of that persuasion happens now in the late spring to early summer part of the campaign. Domenico, I wanted to ask you about this because I think that the timing in the campaign, April, May, June, early and leading into the conventions is actually historically very important in presidential campaigns, at least if you talk

to people like Kevin Madden. Right. Madden, like I said, helped run Romney's campaign. And it was funny when talking to him, he said that he feels like he needs a therapist every time he talks about 2012. Because I talked to him and David Axelrod, who was a senior strategist for the Obama campaign, and Axelrod noted that they made a decision. We went up with an early flight of media that really helped define the race and frankly define our opponent in a way that really framed the debate. Madden and Axelrod both said that they felt like that really changed the race, cemented for people the idea that Mitt Romney, you know, was somebody who didn't care about people like you and really just sort of carved him up in front of swing voters, as Madden said. David Axelrod made a really good point about why

this timing matters. Our attitude back in 2012 was you can always raise more money, but you can't raise more time. Like, look, like you said, Donald Trump could likely raise the money he needs going forward, but he's never going to be able to go back in time to April and June if he doesn't get on air soon. Yeah, it was really fascinating to think about, you know, the fact that they have so much money potentially that they're going to be spending billions of dollars potentially in these campaigns. But the clock is ticking and there's no way to get that time back. I thought that was a really fascinating point. All right, let's take a quick break. And when we get back, we'll talk about some of the messages

in these ads. And we're back. And in contrast to the Trump campaign, the Biden campaign has been really targeted with ad spending so far, not just in terms of states, but in terms of the audience they're trying to reach. Tam, can you explain more what they're trying to do here? Right. Well, let's just talk about some of the ads that they're up with. One of them that is up this week in Pennsylvania, where President Biden was campaigning, is an ad featuring an African-American steelworker talking about the bipartisan infrastructure law that President Biden signed, contrasting that with Trump. What the Biden campaign is trying to do right now is draw a connection, tell voters why Joe Biden is good for them, but also why Donald Trump is bad for them. They're trying to create that contrast. And in Arizona, where the state Supreme Court just allowed an abortion law from the 1800s to go forward, and where there's been a lot of coverage, the Biden campaign saw that coverage

and wanted to ride the wave. And so they did a seven-figure ad buy, added over the next three weeks exclusively featuring ads related to abortion, telling the stories of women who have been affected by these policies. And their idea here is that by running these ads, they are extending the salience of this issue that's already in the news. They are associating President Biden with it, including his voice in the ads. And they're getting some earned media, which is something that former President Trump is really good at. But they're getting cable to talk about their ads. Tim, there's also a strategic but important point here is that the official campaigns sort of get more bang for their dollar when it comes to campaign spending than outside

PACs or super PACs get. Yeah, and this is like a technical thing that I think probably nerds like us are the only ones who really pay attention to. And campaign managers. Yes, and campaigns, very much so. But a candidate and a candidate committee gets a discount, basically, on the ads that they run on broadcast television. They pay less per eyeball than a super PAC would. And so the Biden campaign has the money. They got the money on hand and they are spending it. Thirty million dollars over five weeks this spring. They are spending a lot of money. When MAGA PAC goes and buys ads, they pay more for less. That's just a function of the laws in the country. And just to give some context for just how much the

Biden campaign itself is outspending the Trump campaign, I have the numbers here. And since Super Tuesday, $19 million spent by the Biden campaign proper. Guess how much for the Trump campaign? $22,000. That's literally nothing almost in maybe a few radio ads across the country. Domenico, you've been watching so many of these ads that are coming out from the campaigns. When it comes to Biden's messaging, how much of it is like pro-Biden, positive focus on the candidate, and how much of it is negative attack the opponent? There is a really good traditional mix, I would say, in this. I mean, I think the first ad that they came out with, the first words out of his mouth after the State of the Union speech that he gave were essentially, look, I know I'm not a young guy, you know, but then he pivots to talking about Trump and talking about how, you know, his ideas are old.

Right. And then all of the rest of the ads are essentially contrast ads with Trump saying that he passed an infrastructure bill. Trump didn't. Then they talk about Trump's language in talking about Latinos or immigrants, him talking about women and pushing for overturning of Roe. So really trying to use Trump's words and really go after him on the two major things that he wants to talk about, which is abortion and democracy, and then using specific messages targeted for each of those groups that he needs. The other thing that is really interesting that the Biden campaign is doing is running a significant amount of Spanish language ads in Arizona and Nevada, more than a million dollars that they've spent in each place overall. The Trump campaign is spending nothing in either state.

So for all of the talk about the Trump campaign and Trump himself being able to win over Latinos or more Latinos than maybe some past Republicans have, these things matter. The ads that you run do matter and can affect the numbers. And it should be a worrying sign potentially with the Trump campaign, because while right now he appears to be doing better with Latinos and younger voters, their support is fairly soft, which means that they can be moved. And that's exactly what these numbers are intended to do. And I'll just say that more broadly, we talk about President Biden's approval rating being terrible. It's not like Trump has like a great approval

rating and has no work to do. And he's on trial right now. So Trump can't win on just his base alone. They may be energetic, but remember, Nikki Haley got a lot of votes even after she dropped out. He does have persuasion work to do, and that's hard to do just by holding rallies. Domenico, has the Trump campaign given you an indication of how or when they intend to close this gap if they look at this as sort of wasted time and effort by the Biden campaign now, like, should voters in these states expect more Trump campaign ads going into the convention after the convention into the fall? Like, when do they start picking it up? I'd be shocked if they don't start picking it up over the summer, sometime around the

convention, certainly into the fall. I'd be surprised if they don't start running a lot more ads fairly soon, but they're just not right now. And I think they think that Trump's celebrity, again, is something that insulates them a little bit and that they don't necessarily need to do this and that Biden is wasting his time. But I will say one thing perked my ears up

in listening to a Trump event earlier this month where he calls out President Biden for not agreeing to debate. We have an empty podium right here to my right. You know what that is? That's for Joe Biden. I'm trying to get him to debate. Now, I mean, I was listening to that and I just thought, wow, that must be really a sign that he needs free media attention because the candidate that's quote unquote leading doesn't ever ask for debates. And so it was really a surprise, especially since

Trump didn't participate in any debates during the Republican primary. So it really seemed like a cry for free media attention. And it didn't really work because it really wasn't that widespread and people talking about that moment. All right. Let's leave it there for today. I'm Susan Davis. I cover politics. I'm Susan Davis. I cover politics. I'm Tamara Keith. I cover the White House. And I'm Domenico Montanaro, senior political editor and correspondent. And thanks for listening to the NPR Politics Podcast.