The NPR Politics Podcast - The Power Of Political Advertising

Episode Date: August 28, 2024

Ad spending in the 2024 presidential election is nearing $2 billion. With Vice President Kamala Harris' late entry to the race, we look at how her campaign and that of former President Donald Trump are trying to define Harris politically through advertising. This episode: White House correspondent Deepa Shivaram, political reporter Stephen Fowler, and senior political editor & correspondent Domenico Montanaro.The podcast is produced by Casey Morell and Kelli Wessinger. 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

Support for this podcast and the following message come from Autograph Collection Hotels, with over 300 independent hotels around the world, each exactly like nothing else. Autograph Collection is part of the Marriott Bonvoy portfolio of hotel brands. Find the unforgettable at AutographCollection.com. Hi, this is Tony in St. Paul, Minnesota. I am at the Minnesota State Fair, where I have already tried deep-fried ranch dressing, a buffalo chicken cheese curd taco, and a focaccia ice cream sandwich. This podcast was recorded at 1.19 p.m. on Wednesday, August 28, 2024.

Things may have changed by the time you are listening to this, but I am going to be trying more new food at the Great Minnesota get-together. Okay, here's the show. A focaccia ice cream sandwich? I have been to the Minnesota State Fair, and I have to say, it is one of the best, if not the best, state fair in the country. I would love to make it out there. Hey there, it's the NPR Politics Podcast. I'm Deepa Shivaram. I cover the White House. I'm Stephen Fowler. I cover the campaign. And I'm Domenico Montanaro, senior political editor and correspondent. And today on the show, how campaigns are trying to portray their opponents. When the presidential

race was between Joe Biden and Donald Trump, the playbook for each side was straightforward. But now that Kamala Harris is the Democratic nominee, both her campaign and Trump's are racing to form visions of Harris in voters' minds. And Domenico, this has been playing out in all kinds of ways, right? But I want to focus on the ads that each campaign is putting out. And let's start with Harris. How is she portraying herself in her own ads? Well, first of all, it's been a blitz of ads. I mean, across the seven swing states, the three blue wall states of Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania, and then the four Sunbelt states in the East, Georgia, North Carolina, and out West, Arizona,

Nevada, of course. You know, just in the past month, the top five ads, we've seen $100 million spent, and they're all about Kamala Harris. And Harris's campaign, obviously, trying to put her in the best light. People know her name, but they're not totally familiar with her biography and all of her policy stances. And they're putting out very gauzy biographical ads, including this one, which is the most run ad in the last month, more than 46,000 airings in the seven states. She grew up in a middle class home. She was the daughter of a working mom and she worked at McDonald's while she got her degree. Kamala Harris knows what it's like to be middle class.

It definitely tracks with, you know, Kamala Harris's stump speech talking about being from the middle class. She talks about McDonald's all the time, so much so that former President Bill Clinton even joked about it in his address at the DNC last week. That is one way that she's being portrayed, right? And the other side of things, though, I mean, how is Donald Trump portraying Kamala Harris? Very differently, as you can imagine, right? I mean, and they're very focused on trying to paint her as a San Francisco liberal. And in this case, this ad that's being run by MAGA Inc., Super PAC, that's supporting Trump, and it's an outside group,

calling her a dangerous San Francisco liberal, goes after her in a pretty inflammatory way about her prosecutorial record, in particular about an MS-13 gang member who was in the country illegally and committed a triple murder. Kamala Harris was the liberal San Francisco prosecutor, the most progressive in all of California. She let an

MS-13 gang member go, who then murdered a father and his two sons. A bit of a fact check, this is about a man named Edwin Ramos. Harris's office did not prosecute him in an earlier case because of a lack of evidence. He'd been pulled over because of a young man who was arrested for the murder of a young woman who was arrested for the murder of a young woman who was arrested for the murder of a young woman who was arrested for the murder of a young woman who was arrested for the murder of a young woman who was arrested for the murder of a young woman who was arrested for the murder of a young woman who was arrested for the murder of a young woman who was arrested for the murder of a young woman who was arrested for the murder of a young woman who was arrested for the murder of a young woman who was arrested for the murder of a young woman who was arrested for the murder of a young woman who was arrested for the murder of a young woman who was arrested for the murder of a young woman who was arrested for the murder of a young woman who was arrested for the murder of a young woman who was arrested for the murder of a young woman who was arrested

for the murder of a young woman who was arrested for the murder of a young woman who was arrested for the murder of a young woman who was arrested for the murder of a young woman who was arrested for the murder of a young woman who was arrested for the murder of a young woman who was arrested for the murder of a young woman who was arrested for the murder of a young woman who was arrested for the murder of a young woman who was arrested for the murder of a young woman who was arrested for the murder of a young woman who was arrested for the murder of a young woman who was arrested for the murder of a young woman who was arrested for the murder of a young woman who was arrested for the murder of a young woman who was arrested for the murder of a young woman who was arrested

for the murder of a young woman who was arrested for the murder of a young woman who was arrested for the murder of a young woman who was arrested for the murder of a young woman who was arrested his gun necessarily. And, you know, he was then convicted by Harris's office of the triple murder. He's now serving three life sentences. But nuance and facts, you know, don't always matter in politics. This is really about perception, especially with somebody who's not as well known and views aren't as well formed about Harris. It's so interesting about this prosecutor bit to me, too, because, you know, I covered Kamala Harris's campaign in 2019 when she was first running for president. And the prosecutor identity was a liability for her amongst other Democrats, right? Like the left or wings of the party called her a cop, were really unhappy with her prosecutor

record. And now it's like really being rallied around as this selling point of like, you know, you have the prosecutor versus Donald Trump, who's been convicted of felonies. And that's the contrast that the Harris campaign is trying to put up. But at the same time, it's still kind of a liability, right? I mean, the fact that she called herself a progressive prosecutor puts that in in the Trump campaign to sort of hit Harris on her own criminal justice record. Stephen, how is the Trump campaign using this, planning to use this? What have you been seeing so far? Like many things in politics in recent years, this is a bit of a Rorschach test. I mean, to a lot of conservatives and Republicans, this idea of a progressive prosecutor is a really effective tool to turn out their own voters and say, look, this is what happens when Democrats are in charge of law and order. Bad things happen. You know, here in Georgia, there was an effort by state lawmakers to create

this prosecutorial oversight commission to rein in rogue DAs that they say aren't following the law and aren't prosecuting people. And we're seeing that at the national level, too, here with Harris. The fact that she was the top law enforcement official in California and has this record as a prosecutor is being used by Republicans as a cudgel to say that, look, she's soft on crime. Crime is spiking in urban centers where there are Democrats in charge. And that record as a prosecutor is being used as a shorthand for saying they're not tough on crime, Republicans are tough on crime, and if you elect a Democrat, crime is coming to a city slash suburb slash small town near you. And Domenico, I mean, I feel like this is where it gets really interesting for Harris, right? Because her last three or so years as vice president, you know, she had a lot of

issues on her plate that didn't work for her. I mean, being the point person dealing with the root causes of migration, taking on voting rights. Until the Dobbs decision came down, she didn't have a singular issue she was able to successfully take the lead on. Does that put her in a position now where highlighting her past career as a prosecutor kind of makes more sense than highlighting her time as vice president. Well, she's lucky because as vice president, she can pick and choose what she wants to take credit for. You know, I thought it was really interesting that in her acceptance speech, when she said that she organized 50 countries to unify to fight against Russia to support Ukraine, I just thought, wasn't Joe Biden president?

And there's all these other things that obviously she doesn't want to necessarily take the blame for on things like immigration, for example. I think that her prosecutorial record, what's interesting about this is that it's key for her to frame her prosecutorial record in a way that's to her advantage, which is what she came out doing very quickly. And I think it's been an advantage for her not to have to go through a primary because she doesn't have to pivot to the middle. She's starting there. And it does like some of that, you know, picking and choosing that she's able to do, Stephen, it leaves a little bit of room, right, for voters and for people to form a new opinion

of her almost because she's able to kind of reframe her record in a way. Exactly. So much of the last four years has been dominated by Joe Biden and Donald Trump. And voters have said, hey, we would like another option other than Joe Biden and Donald Trump. And now that the Democratic Party has done that, even though Kamala Harris is the sitting vice president and is a heartbeat away from being the president herself, even though it is the Biden-Harris administration, this sort of willingness by voters to seek change elsewhere has given her this blank slate where she can kind of be all things to all people and not really disappoint anyone yet.

OK, we're going to take a quick break and more when we get back. And we're back. And the thing about ads is that they cost a lot of money. Domenico, who at this point has the spending advantage here? And where are the campaigns spending their money? Wow. I mean, there has been half a billion dollars spent between the Republicans and Democrats in the last month. We've already crossed the billion dollar threshold for the entirety of this election. And we're already heading toward

almost two billion in reservations for the rest of the fall campaign. I mean, this is just a whopping sum of money that they're spending. And, you know, you could say that they're flooding the airwaves and it might not make any difference. Well, clearly, they feel like cavalry sort of rushing in to be able to help him as Harris has been starting to take the lead. And this is a really sharp turnaround from what we saw earlier in the campaign when Biden had a huge spending advantage, almost all to himself outside of Pennsylvania. I think the thing also is that as Harris takes the lead narrowly, right, so there's a lot of spending on their side, a lot of spending on Trump's side. One thing I want to focus on though is the advertising online, right? Digital ads are different than TV ads by design in terms of

the audience they're reaching. How are the campaigns using the online ads maybe differently? Well, yeah. So this is where Harris has a huge advantage and a very different strategy than the Trump folks do. I mean Harris is outspending Trump $72 million to $16 million online. It's like the Trump campaign and allies are basically ceding the internet to Kamala Harris. There's good reason for why Harris needs to use the internet and use online platforms to be able to reach people. It's because younger voters are all online, whether it's TikTok, YouTube, whatever. Trump's folks are not necessarily in that cohort as much, and they need to reach more of the traditional Republican voters in these swing states. To the point about the messaging and the audience, you know, there are completely different messages and sometimes

completely different audiences that these ads are trying to reach. Sometimes, even though they're being put on the air in swing states, the ads aren't necessarily designed to reach voters. They're designed to get people talking about them and media outlets to talk about them. And speaking of that, Deepa, the Harris campaign now has contrast ads that they're launching against Trump. What's that about? Yeah, I mean, the first one came out today, because as we were talking about earlier, right, Harris has had to spend the last, I've lost track of the weeks now, six weeks of this very brief campaign defining herself and putting out ads that tell her story. Now, though, they have to pivot, right? Less than 70 days to go. They're trying to do that contrast work. And as you can imagine, Project 2025 taking front and center in these ads.

Donald Trump's back and he's out for complete control. I will wield that power very aggressively. And he has a plan to get it. Detailed plans for exactly what our movement will do. It's called Project 2025, a 922-page blueprint to make Donald Trump the most powerful president ever. And I think, you know, this focus on Project 2025, you will see the Harris campaign basically talk about this every single day from now until November. It's not going away. And it really has been a successful way to sort of peg Trump for Democratic voters and voters who are a little on the line about how they're feeling so far. ties to Trump who could wind up in a future Trump administration. And, you know, with a lot of

unpopular ideas, there is a Venn diagram between the Trump campaign and Project 2025 with a lot of policy overlap. Some of the things Trump has disavowed, but that has not stopped the Harris campaign from trying to peg all of it to Trump. We're going to leave it there for today. I'm Deepa Shivaram. I cover the White House. I'm Stephen Fowler. I cover the campaign. And I'm Domenico Montanaro, senior political editor and correspondent. And thank you for listening to the NPR Politics Podcast.