The Battle For The Airwaves
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$45 upfront payment equivalent to $15 per month. New customers on first three-month plan only. Taxes and fees extra. Speeds lower above 40 gigabytes. See details. Hello and welcome to the FiveThirtyEight Politics Podcast. I'm Galen Druk. Tonight, in millions of homes around the country, Americans will sit down to watch their favorite TV programming –

And when the show goes to commercial, they will confront a growing nuisance. No, I'm not talking about the whopper whopper BK have it your way song, which actually kind of has a ring to it. I am, of course, talking about campaign ads. With less than four weeks until election day, the onslaught is here. It's happening wherever there is a competitive congressional race, a big referendum on the ballot, and of course, most of all, in the seven states where the presidential campaign is being fought. Today, we're going to assess the state of

of the battle for the airwaves. Who's outspending whom? What are the campaigns emphasizing? And will it make any difference at all? We'll also listen to and assess several actual ads that are on the airwaves right now. So for all of you listeners who do not live in a swing state, we hope this episode reduces your FOMO.

Joining me today is someone who has done a lot of work measuring ad spending and strategy in this campaign. Erica Franklin Fowler is one of the directors of the Wesleyan Media Project, which tracks political advertising. She's also a professor of government at Wesleyan. Welcome to the podcast, Erica.

Thanks so much for having me. So first of all, I just have to ask, as the director of the Wesleyan Media Project, do you enjoy watching campaign ads? I do. I totally do. If I didn't, this would be a very awful job. The Wesleyan Media Project has been tracking ads in real time since the 2010 election, and we have data that goes back to 2000. So it's...

It's also the case that you see a lot of the same themes and the ways in which ads are constructed are not necessarily new news. So part of what's fun is seeing what is new about advertising, but also looking at what is old. What makes a good political ad? Is there a clear equation or is it you know it when you see it?

Well, I would say it's a little bit of both. I think, of course, a lot of it depends on what the goals of a campaign are. And so the most important characteristics, I think, of campaign ads and the ones that people think about the most have to do with tone. But there are lots of different ways that we can think about and talk about

the tone of advertising, and then the issues and how they're being addressed, and then who is being featured. And if you're looking at an ad, obviously the color and the tonality, all of that is really important to how ads are constructed and put together to elicit emotions, basically. So for tone, right, you have, you know,

positive about the candidate, you have negative about the opponent, or you have contrasting, which is, you know, this person did this terrible thing, but I've done this wonderful thing. Then, of course, the issue suite is pretty familiar to listeners of this podcast.

At this point, and then who is actually featured candidates, right, are making a choice between do we feature the candidate? Do we feature an everyday person, a voter? Do we feature a spouse, somebody who either makes them look more familiar, or maybe situates them in a position of leadership? So are those the three different variables that we're talking about?

Yeah. And there are, of course, a lot of other considerations too, like who else is featured in an ad. When you're thinking about the initial construction, it's, you know, is the candidate on screen speaking or is somebody speaking on their behalf? And then what are the other visual imagery that goes along with all of those things? And

And so we are going to dive into those in a second. But just big picture to start, what is the state of the advertising battle in the presidential race so far? What is each side doing? And would you say that one side has the edge?

Let's start the presidential campaign after Biden drops out because there's a different contest that we would describe before that. I think that's fair. So after Harris becomes the presumptive nominee, you do have a ramping up of advertising on both sides, actually. And the Republicans were first out of the gate, actually, right after nomination, which makes sense. The Harris campaign was working to get

rolled out. But in that initial, you know, late July through summer, the campaigns were pretty evenly matched on television. And it's really just in the last month or so that we've seen the Harris campaign really have the edge. In the last

few days of the release, you know, so early October, we're starting to see the edge slip a little bit. So Trump is certainly ramping back up on television. So they're becoming more competitive, but at least in the television environment, Harris has definitely had the edge for a while. I think at

538, the conventional wisdom about ad spending has generally been that it's something of mutually assured destruction, that if you are running a lot of ads and your opponent isn't, then there isn't an advantage to all of those TV ads. But in a presidential race where there's so much attention made and so much not just paid media, but also earned media, you know, wall to wall coverage on the networks and on social media and whatnot.

that this all kind of cancels each other out. But do you think that the advantage that Harris has had over the past month is big enough to make a difference?

It always in campaigns comes down to what makes the difference, right? And as my advisor always famously says, advertising matters at the margin, but that doesn't mean the margin doesn't matter, right? So advertising is really about those fractional percentages. And so the campaigns are going to compete for every advantage that they possibly can. You're totally right that the advertising landscape is not everything because there is earned media coverage matters a lot.

I think I have seen academic reports that are tracking the both volume, but also tone of the presidential campaign. And they do suggest that, you know, in prior cycles, Trump could count on sort of dominating the news landscape in terms of earners.

earned media. So no matter how far behind he might be in advertising, he typically had an advantage in the news media. But that doesn't seem to be true this cycle. And so I do think, you know, the Harris campaign has had a decent few weeks where they've had both a paid media advantage and some favorable news media coverage. And so certainly those two things together can help at the margins.

Can we put some numbers to this? I mean, just how much money do we expect both sides to spend on advertising and how many ads does that equate to?

The numbers are stunning, right? So even if you just look at the two weeks that end October 7th, the Harris campaign and her allies on television have aired over 70,000 ads. It's almost 71,000 ads. And the Trump campaign plus his group allies have aired over 51,000 ads.

So and that's just two weeks. Right. So the total is going to be much larger than that. Open Secrets just put out a report saying that this year is going to break records again. You know, we just keep seeing more and more money, more and more advertising. It's not the case that the presidential race this year is groundbreaking in terms of volumes, but the volume is large and all of the battleground states are being inundated with them.

Yeah, it seemed like in 2020, there was really something of a peak in terms of TV advertising. I guess folks thought maybe everyone's at home. We can't spend our money doing the traditional rallies anyway. We're just going to bombard people on their couches while they're social distancing or whatever. I mean, how much does all of this cost? Like 70,000 ads in two weeks. If I wanted to buy 70,000 ads in two weeks, how much money am I spending? Yeah, hundreds of millions of dollars, right? So it's

Over 109, at least, for the Harris campaign, a similar amount, not quite $100 million for the pro-Trump and his allies. So it's a lot of money. And I do think you're right that 2020 was an unusual campaign because people were home. But the other important thing to remember about 2020 is that if you look cycle to date in terms of presidential spending, we also had two billionaires that were contesting the Democratic nomination. And so their sheer amount of spending early on is also part of what makes the 2020 cycle unusual.

unusually high. We're talking about Tom Steyer and Michael Bloomberg, right? Not Joe Biden and Donald Trump.

That's correct. Yes. All right. Well, with that, let's dive into the fun and watch some of these ads. And we're going to start with the presidential campaign, but we will get to down ballot races. So the most common focuses of both Harris and Trump, according to your data over the past month, has been the economy and inflation. So first, let's start by listening to Harris on the economy.

$4,000. That's about how much the Trump tax plan will cost families each year. It's a tax on imports you'll pay for every day. A Trump tax on food, on gas, and on medicine. Here's Kamala Harris' plan. A tax cut for 100 million middle-class Americans and lower everyday costs for families. The math is simple. With Trump, you'll pay thousands more. With Harris, you'll keep thousands more. I'm Kamala Harris, and I approve this message.

So there we have it, your classic contrast ad. My opponent has done blah, blah, blah, or will do blah, blah, blah, but I will do blah, blah, blah. So what percentage of Harris's ads are focusing on economic issues, be it inflation, jobs, taxes, that umbrella?

It's a large number. I don't have the actual percentage for the total time, but I can tell you that in the two weeks that end on October 6th, it's over one in five ads talk about the economy, mention things like inflation or taxes and housing. Quite a bit, but not really blotting out the sun when it comes to the economy. How does that compare to Trump?

Trump's ads currently, again, in the two weeks that end October 6th are mostly focusing on taxes and jobs. So I do think those are economic ads. The generic economic references appears in like 40 percent of his spots. All right. Well, let's take a listen to Trump on the economy.

Thanks a lot, Kamala.

Trump had our economy humming. He'll do it again. I'm Donald J. Trump and I approve this message. So I guess that one is a little bit different. Would you consider that a contrast ad or a negative ad? It's mostly my opponent has done blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. But then at the very end, like, hey, I'm Donald Trump and everything is going to be great. Well, in our definition, that would still be contrast because the only like to be a pure negative spot, the

only mention of you would be in the paid for by line. And so there is a little bit, it's not a lot, but there's a little bit of reference to, you know, Trump has our economy humming, definitely still contrast there. The beginning of the ad is one of my favorite all time, you know, like

advertising tricks where they try to blame one candidate for the tie-breaking vote, right? So, and it doesn't matter where those ads air across the country. It's always this person has, you know, like cast the tie-breaking vote for X, Y, or Z. We've seen in poll after poll after poll that Trump leads Harris on the issue of the economy in terms of who voters trust more to handle the issue. But Harris has narrowed the gap over where Biden was and even from where she began in, you know, early August.

And on some particular questions in some polls, like on prices or housing, she actually leads in terms of trust. Are these ads meant generally to be a response to what candidates perceive to be their strengths?

or are they trying to shore up weaknesses? Well, I think it's some of both, right? So if you are a candidate who believes that an issue is your strength, you're going to want to talk about it and talk more about it, right? And if you're a candidate who is maybe not as strong on an issue, but your opponent is talking about that issue, you have two choices, either try to change the subject entirely or try to combat the issue focus at the other side.

And so certainly the economy is so important. It's not something that I think the Harris campaign could choose to leave alone. Certainly there are indications that our economy is doing much better, but we're

ordinary citizens still are feeling it in their pocketbooks and they're feeling it in a variety of ways. They don't perceive that they are better off now than they were four years ago. And so for those reasons, I think the Harris campaign has to talk about it and has to find ways to, you know, both thread the needle of, you know, I am a part of the current administration, but here is how I will continue to improve things or here's how I will change things. Can you give me a sense of what the rest of the breakdown looks like in terms of

where Harris and Trump are focusing their ad spending, what issues? Yeah. And I think it's been interesting because there definitely has been variation since late July, right? Both campaigns were focusing hotly on immigration for a while, and then they turned to the economy and heading into early October, they're maybe diversifying some of the stuff they're talking about. So economic issues still play a lot, but

The Harris campaign in particular is also highlighting health care and prescription drugs, lowering the cost of those as well. It's also notable that, and Harris is not alone in this, because Democrats up and down the ticket are referencing abortion for obvious reasons. And then the Trump campaign is taking a host of different issues. Of course, the economy is top of the list, but he's also mentioning cost of housing and other things. Housing this year is maybe stifling.

It's not surprising from an ordinary citizen perspective, but I was quite surprised actually to see how high housing is on the list of top issues because it hasn't risen at the presidential level to the attention that it's gotten this year. And then Social Security, things like that always are sort of evergreen issues that tend to be talked about. And so Trump is also referencing those. Okay, so let's listen to one of the examples that you just mentioned, which is the Harris campaign messaging on Twitter.

He told us who he was. Should abortion be punished? There has to be some form of punishment. Then he showed us. For 54 years, they were trying to get...

Roe v. Wade terminated, and I did it. And I'm proud to have done it. Now Donald Trump wants to go further with plans to restrict birth control, ban abortion nationwide, even monitor women's pregnancies. We know who Donald Trump is. He'll take control. We'll pay the price. I'm Kamala Harris, and I approve this message.

So there we have an example of a fully negative ad. And something that you notice looking at your data is that the Harris campaign and Democrats in general do focus to some extent on the issue of abortion. You don't really see Republicans responding on the issue directly.

at all. In debates or in interviews, Trump will say Democrats are the actual extremists. They support abortion until the third trimester, or I just wanted to give the power back to the states and I don't necessarily want a national abortion ban. But that's not actually being messaged in any of these ads. And so ads like the one we just heard actually appear to be going

uncontested on the airwaves. Is my conclusion there the same as what you've concluded? Yeah, you're right. And it's not just this cycle. This is continuing a cycle in 2022 that, you know, Democrats talked a lot about abortion and abortion rights, women's rights to choose, and Republicans, there really was not a response. And I think it's in part that Republicans don't know how to message on this issue in a way that

could be helpful to them. So that's part of the reason for the lack of response on that side.

And it's also notable to me that for a long time, Democrats found themselves in a similar position on the issue of immigration. So Republicans have been more hawkish on the issue and also advertised on it an awful lot across the past decade. And Democrats, when they respond, has been something along the lines of this is bigoted messaging, but has rarely actually directly gone to the issue of border security until

until recently. Are we seeing in the data that Democrats are, in fact, putting up more ads about immigration? Or is that just my perception as a watcher of politics? No, I think you're right. I think Democrats are taking on the issue of immigration more head on. It tends to be not all that dissimilar in types of messaging, actually, from some of the Republican messaging. So they will often, and you'll see this in some of the other

races that I know we wanted to discuss, they'll often feature

sheriffs from local jurisdictions saying, I might be a Republican, but I still support so-and-so Democrat for Congress because they are fighting for border security and they are fighting to close the border and stop fentanyl and other things. So it's definitely the case that immigration is getting more attention. I'm not sure that it's necessarily differential attention from both parties. They both tend to be messaging on the same issues, which are border security and the fentanyl crisis.

To your point, it's kind of remarkable. I saw my first unsought out political ad of the season over the weekend. I do end up watching political ads because of my job, but I was watching Saturday Night Live and an ad for Senator Kirsten Gillibrand came up on the screen and it started with a picture of a wall at the border and was talking about border security. Now, folks will remember Kirsten Gillibrand ran for president. She

she announced in 2019 as a big progressive, right? You know, she was part of the hashtag resistance against Trump. And she was the first voice to call for Al Franken to step down from the Senate. And when you think of New York progressive, you probably think of Kirsten Gillibrand. And yet the first messaging that I have seen from her in this entire campaign was about border security. Yeah, it's stunning.

So to that end, let's listen to what Democrats are responding to. And this is an ad on public safety and immigration from the Trump team.

I'm Donald Trump and I approve this message. Jash Shaw was a 17 year old football star who was gunned down just outside his home. His killer? An illegal immigrant gang member who just got out of prison. Jash's dad Jameel is supporting Donald Trump for president because he knows he will end illegal immigration. Trump is the only one saying, "You're gonna be dealt with. We're gonna enforce that." We're gonna enforce that.

That's a beautiful thing. I believe Donald Trump wants to make this great again. And he loves America. OK, tricky question here. Was that a positive ad about Donald Trump? How would you categorize that ad? Because it didn't mention Harris at all. He just mentioned Trump.

It would be classified in our definition as a positive ad because there is not a mention of the other candidate. So this is where I think it's super important for listeners. And this gets into the wonky, you know, political science definitions, but that doesn't feel positive, right? It feels very negative. And there is a difference between the way that we classify ads and the way that ads feel in some ways intentionally, because tone is inherently subjective.

And so you and I might listen to a spot. This one, I think we would agree is feels negative. Well, maybe until the very end. We're right where he's like, it's a beautiful thing. He's going to make America great. Right. Right. Everything's fine. It's wonderful. But the tone of an ad is.

is slightly separate from how we think about it in political science, where we tend to use, you know, hard and fast, more objective rules to define the ads. And that's in part so that we can get high intercoder reliability and we can be consistent in the way in which we classify advertising. So in preparing to talk to you, I was trying to figure out if there's any clear evidence as to which ads actually work. And in one recent study that looked at 650

different political ads, there are very clear differences. Some ads are twice as effective in convincing voters. But the study resulted in this headline in political. Nobody knows which political ads work and why. There were not clear trends in terms of which of those ads actually worked. So when we're talking about music, voice, people, tone, issues, whatever it

it's not actually clear what is making the difference. Like you just try something, show it to a focus group, and if it hits, it goes to the airwaves. What are political professionals doing in that case? Herein lies the challenge of advertising, right? There are certain things that we know to be true about content, but there are so many different factors that go into any given race and the candidates for those races and the way in which they can be described.

Campaign practitioners tend to go negative. That is a known trend, right? So there's this conventional wisdom that negativity must work because why else would people do it? On the political science side of the coin, we can show that negativity is more memorable. Negative ads tend to include more things like policy, which is actually somewhat important. When voters think about negativity, they maybe tend to think about mudslinging, right? So really inflammatory ads.

negative language. This person cheated on their spouse and hates you, you know, like that kind of thing. Exactly. And that is definitely not liked by the American public. What they probably think less about is that the negative ads do tend to contain more actual policy information. So-and-so voted for, voted against, or, you know, and some of these things

stretch the truth. That's part of what campaigning is about, right? Putting your candidate in the best possible light. But I think if you think about the purely positive spots, most of those, the one we just listened to aside,

tend to have a candidate and their family walking through a park. Invariably, there's a golden retriever, you know, like they tend to be dressed in similar blue shirts and khaki pants. A finance bro vest. Right, exactly. In the case of Raphael Warnock. Exactly. So the issue content that you would learn if we had solely positive campaigning would not be sufficient to support a democratically desirable society. And so I think some of the, you know, political science pushback to all negativity is not

bad is important to keep in mind. What is the breakdown of positive versus negative versus contrast ads in this cycle?

So we look at that usually by race and so different types of races. I can tell you that the Senate ads this cycle are unusually negative. They have an unusually high number of pure attacks. The Trump campaign is also overwhelmingly attack. It's a mix of attack and contrast ads, very few what we would call pure promotional ads, which is somewhat unusual, although I will say too that as a high profile campaign,

former incumbent. There may be few things that one could say in a purely positive ad that would be helpful to a campaign. So it's not necessarily surprising given who Trump is that most of his ads are attack and contrast. The Harris campaign and her allies by contrast are airing 25% ish of her ads are promotional, pure positive spots. And then there's an even mix beyond that in the last few weeks of attack and contrast.

And yeah, I think that makes sense. In contrast to Trump, a lot of Americans didn't have a very set view of who Harris is, evidenced by the fact that her favorability rating and her average changed by like net 16 percentage points in the span of a month or so. I want to ask a question here that I think is important because we haven't made the distinction yet.

In terms of advertising, the campaigns can spend their own money on advertising and they do and they get preferable rates when they're buying ad spots and things like that. But there are also ads coming from political action committees. And so I'm curious how that works. Can there be any coordination? What is the whole world of political action committees doing when it comes to ad spending?

Yeah, so it's important to distinguish between the two different types of non-candidate spending. So there is party-sponsored airings and there's coordinated spots, which are where the campaign and the party are explicitly coordinating and putting out a spot.

Those are one type. And then the other type is the independent expenditures or outside group advertising. And the outside groups, the air ads on behalf of candidates are not allowed to coordinate. Although that campaigns and outside groups, there can be a lot of ways in which they can communicate getting around the coordination aspect.

restrictions, if that makes sense. So I just dump a bunch of content on YouTube and hope that the political action committee finds it. They dump a bunch of content on YouTube. They can also say to anyone, it would be really great if we had more messaging on X, Y or Z. Right. So and they can put up videos of the candidate. They can do all kinds of things that sort of signal to their partners. Here's how and in which ways we would like help.

We've so far been talking mostly about TV ad spending, but I also want to talk about digital because in one of your most recent reports for the two week period that you looked at, the Harris campaign actually far outspent the Trump campaign when it came to digital advertising. Forty million dollars compared to eight million dollars.

And one of the reasons that that's so striking is because Trump put such an emphasis, particularly in the 2016 election, on digital spending. And so I'm curious why this time there's such a big gap and such a big gap in Harris's favor.

Yeah, so it's a really good question. And that is the contrast that I like to raise is that 2016 post-election when the Trump campaign admitted that they spent 50% of their advertising budget on digital. It was quite stunning, even to scholars who study it. I will say for the past 14 years that we've been running the Wesleyan Media Project, scholars have always and reporters have always asked, is this the end of television? Every year there's that

There's that question. And there's still said to be millions and millions of ads that are aired on television. We're approaching almost 3 million already. Television is still really important, but the digital space is super important and has been, you know, for the last eight years for sure. How to explain Trump's, you know, severe disadvantage might be a little bit more challenging, but I can give it a couple of guesses. So first,

In the 2016 election, there were policies that no longer exist. So at Facebook, you know, Facebook in the 2016 election cycle offered both campaigns what were called embeds. So they basically said to both campaigns, you know, if you want somebody from Facebook to help you run your advertising and show you how it works, you know, we are here to help.

The Clinton campaign chose not to take Facebook really up on that offer, whereas the Trump campaign was being understaffed and they didn't have a lot of other external resources even helping them at that time. A lot of outside groups had that cycle out. They took full advantage. And so I think that may partly explain why there was so much spending in 2016. Trump himself is a

television politician, right? He tends to dominate the television space. He watches a lot of television. And so I suspect perhaps that part of what we're seeing is his intuition about where money should be spent in the campaign. That's just a guess. But it definitely does seem to be the case that the Trump campaign, when they're spending on digital, they are spending more in the YouTube environment, which is more like television spot. And in fact,

We know from media consumption trends that young men spend significantly more time on YouTube than, for example, young women. And I think young men are a part of the electorate that Trump sees as an upside for

for him, whereas when it comes to media consumption, we see young women spending more time on things like TikTok and Instagram. What we can also say about digital advertising is that it can be a little bit more targeted. When you put up an ad on television, whoever happens to be watching that TV is going to see it.

But with digital ads, you can really target a type of person. And I think we have an example here of something that the Harris campaign is trying to target very directly and limitedly, which is this ad that is somewhat of a pro-Palestine ad.

I will not be silent about the scale of human suffering in Gaza, including the death of far too many innocent civilians. Our common humanity compels us to act. That's an ad that ran on Snapchat and you'll see on screen that it's paid for by the Harris campaign. How does this work? You know, how do you figure out as a campaign

who to target with the messages that you only want a part of your coalition to hear and not another part of your coalition to hear? Well, the first thing is this, you know, targeting of campaigns and targeting of campaign messaging is definitely not new. It's not even new with like, even on television, even though you're totally right that you can't micro target the way that you can. And in the digital environment, there can still be, you know,

segmentation of viewers, right? Because if you're airing an ad during daytime soap operas, that's a different audience than it then airs, you know, during evening sports programming and for what, and what have you. So this has always happened. It just can happen at a much more, um,

granular scale on digital spaces. And so, yeah, the Snapchat ad in particular, obviously Snapchat has a particular demographic. It tends to be much younger. It makes sense that the Harris campaign would use an ad like this and an issue like this that is not appearing in any of other their television spots, for example, to be targeted to a younger generation that is concerned about

the Middle East and the crisis there in Gaza. And so that is, I think, part of the reason why you see it in those spaces. Campaigns are always making decisions about who are the persuadables, right? Who can we reach who might vote for us if we get them enough reason to do so? And then also trying to mobilize, right? Mobilize the base that they believe will vote for them if they show up at the polls. And so the decisions that they make are always a consideration of those two factors,

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Let's move down ballot and start with two marquee Senate races. So you found that the two states with the most Senate ads aired were Montana and Ohio. Unsurprisingly, those are the two races that appear closest in our polling averages. So at last check in Montana, the Republican Tim Sheehy leads by four points. In Ohio, Democratic incumbent Sherrod Brown leads by three.

You found that Republicans were spending more in Ohio and Democrats were spending more in Montana.

Is that a trend that you see over time? In a close race, the candidate that seems to be down in the polls or the party that seems to be down in the polls is the one spending more money? It's always the case that if, especially if it's an incumbent who is down, that they will spend more, right? Because the incumbents have a lot at stake. But it is also the case that whoever is trailing needs to do everything they can to make up for it. So yeah, there is a correlation between spending and the polling averages. We

We also pay a lot of attention, again, you know, not all ads are equal, but we do pay attention to the balance of the ads that are on air because when one candidate has an advantage, that is also where we tend to see some evidence of poll movement, if all else equal, right? So looking at the balance between those two races is important. Okay, let's dive in. Here is an ad from Democrat John Tester in Montana.

I thought buying a home was going to be completely out of reach for me. Thanks to Jon Tester, I was able to buy a home through a program that helps Montanans afford a house in their own community. And Jon's working to cut taxes for first-time homebuyers just like me. I don't care what happens in DC. This is about Montana. I know Jon is making a difference helping Montanans afford housing. I'm living it every day. I'm Jon Tester and I approve this message.

I don't care what happens in DC. This is about Montana. Obviously, a message that Jon Tester wants to impress upon voters there because it's not a particularly democratic state and his party is not popular there. So he has to distinguish himself. And probably the issue of housing is a good place to do it. I mean, the average price of a home there has risen by more than 60% since the beginning of

2020. You know, Montana is maybe an extreme example of this. But I'm curious to what extent down ballot Democrats are running against their party, or their national party or running against DC.

They're definitely doing it. And that's a trend that you see, you know, over and over again is that even members of Congress run for Congress by running against it in some ways. So the trend is not new, but it definitely is the case, especially in a cycle like this, when the most competitive contest that you see Democrats up and down the ballot saying that they have broken with their party, that they are standing up to the president, that they are doing things.

for the interests of their state. So those state ads look different. The scenery that you would see if you're watching this ad in Montana is different than the scenery that appears in Maine, for example, or in Colorado. But the message is the same, that we care about what happens here.

not what happens in Washington. But I do want to say too that the exception to this rule has been Trump. We find many fewer Republicans who are willing to say that they stand up to President Trump if they usually just leave him out of it entirely. So there is an interesting dynamic between the two.

Well, especially this cycle, because for reasons that I think astute political analysts have not fully settled on, Trump is running ahead of Republicans in Senate races across the country. Usually, I mean, we have seen in 2016 and 2020 that non-Trump Republicans run ahead of Trump in elections.

2020, if Trump had done as well as the average of Republicans nationally, he may well have won the presidential election. This time around, it seems like things have flipped and Trump is actually more popular than his party down ballot vote.

potentially, maybe who knows some of those traditional Republicans who would have been bolstering the down ballot. Republicans previously have just switched sides at this point or maybe aren't interested at all. Only time will tell and we'll have a lot more data on Election Day. I want to also give an example of an ad that we're hearing from a Republican in a competitive race, and that is in Ohio. This is from Bernie Marino's team. Sherrod Brown.

When he wanted your vote... On major issues, I'll stand up to the president of my own party. But Brown votes with Joe Biden and Kamala Harris 97% on radical issues like amnesty for 11 million illegals, COVID stimulus checks to convicted criminals, taxpayer-funded health care, and Social Security benefits for illegals. 31 years in Washington has made Sherrod Brown too liberal for Ohio. American Crossroads is responsible for the content of this advertising.

And there you have it. The Moreno team addressing that issue that we were just talking about head on. Sherrod Brown may say that he breaks with his party, but in fact, the data suggests otherwise. You know, we said that at the top of the ticket,

there's a mutually assured destruction dynamic where there's so much attention that it may reduce the marginal impact of any one ad or even a whole bunch of ad spending. As we move down ballot, and we're going to talk about House races next, does that dynamic change? Yeah, advertising does and should be expected to matter more as you go lower down the ballot, because there are fewer places for people to get information, right? So the presidential race is

almost everywhere right now. I live in Connecticut. And so, you know, we get very, very few actual television ads, but you can't still escape the presidential contest because it is just the talk of the town, right? That it's on all the news stations, it's on all of the other things. Whereas as you go down ballot,

people know less about their candidates. And so advertising may be some of the only ways that they're reminded that, oh yeah, this candidate is running for election and maybe has an issue that I should care about. Certainly it is the case we can demonstrate that advertising matters more the lower you go on the ballot. Okay, so let's look at some of those lower ballot races. This is a Democratic ad from Maine's 2nd District. I've been on the water since I was two days old.

fished up and down the coast from Nantucket to Eastport. I've been paying into Medicare, Social Security my whole life, every paycheck. Those benefits should be there when we retire. But Austin Terrio wants to join extremists in Congress trying to cut Social Security and Medicare. I earned those benefits. Austin Terrio should not be able to take those away. DCCC is responsible for the content of this ad.

So that one came from the party and not the actual candidate and is fully negative. Of course, you don't even hear who the candidate is in this circumstance. But it's also not surprising that in many ways, a Democrat accusing Republicans of trying to take away Social Security benefits is a tale as old as time. Is that...

a theme this cycle? What are we seeing in terms of what House candidates are running on? Yeah, so it definitely is something that continues to be raised. It's definitely a top topic, especially on television, where you have more audiences who are older and care a lot about Social Security and Medicare. So certainly those are issues. I think that what this ad is emblematic of, and it's not unique to Maine specifically, but the Maine ads right now, if you watch the imagery of that ad, if you were able to see it,

has a lot of the coastline. It's got the boat. You have the fishermen standing on the boat. He's talking about Medicare and Social Security, but he's also conveying really important details about, I am from Maine, right? I am from here and I am of this particular class of individuals. And that's not unique to the other ads that are also airing in that district. So the rip

Republican opponent is also airing ads, you know, talking about lobstermen and, you know, like fishing rights and other sorts of things. And so you have the classic Maine issues and Maine imagery to go alongside some of the more nationalized discussion of issues in a campaign. And of course, a hot topic in Maine being, you know, people coming from other states, increasing housing prices, etc, etc. And so while you don't even say that, you get that. It

It's not dissimilar from the Montana ads where you have, you know, Tester talking and even ads that are not run by Tester talking about the rich out-of-stater who's coming in and raising home prices. You know, those themes, although they appear differently in Maine, are similar. All right. Now let's listen to a Republican House ad. This one is from Colorado's 8th and features some voter testimony.

The pill that killed Brooke came across our border and it never should have been here. She took half a pill one time, it was laced with fentanyl and she was gone. Yadira Carabello voted against solving the border crisis, against cracking down on cartels and she even voted to defelonize fentanyl. Yadira Carabello had a chance to stop this and she did nothing.

Meanwhile, I had to bury my daughter. Congressional Leadership Fund is responsible for the content of this advertising.

So I think we have two pretty indicative ads here of how maybe down ballot Democrats and Republicans are campaigning. Democrats are saying Republicans are going to take your social security benefits away. Republicans are saying that Democrats have been bad on the border and bad on crime and safety, and it's resulting in a fentanyl crisis. When we hear from actual voters, as we had in the last two ads, or at least actual people who live in the district,

Why are we hearing from them and why are we not hearing from the candidates themselves? Well, we are hearing from the candidates themselves in some of the ads, but I think this ad is a testimonial ad, right? It's hard hitting, right? The closing line there is I had to bury my daughter. It demonstrates a real life impact and features average Americans speaking about issues that are important to them. This one might be an extreme example of that, right? You don't usually have mothers who

have their children killed speaking in advertising, but it's not dissimilar from, you know, mothers that are being featured in abortion ads talking about the effect on their daughters too. So that's part of, you know, campaign advertising ploying.

playbook, right? It's finding other people to be messengers for your candidate and your campaign. Gabe Evans, the challenger there is, you know, like in ads himself, where he says, I'm Gabe Evans and I know how to fix this. I've served in a combat zone. I've spent 10 years as a

police officer. And so he brings already to the table this, you know, law enforcement background. So that is part of the theme of his messaging. And so then the Democratic incumbent does have to play defense. And so her ads feature not maybe surprisingly an Iraq war veteran speaking to her, you know, like the way that she does care about these issues. And then Adams County Sheriff, who says that, you know, that the attacks just aren't true. She is working to work with Republicans to fund border agents and things along those lines.

You mentioned that there was a clear advantage at the top of the ticket in terms of Harris outspending Trump. What are we seeing in terms of trends down ballot? Are Democrats maintaining their spending advantage there or Republicans catching up? Democrats are, on average, spending much more in House races, and that's not an unusual trend.

Either this cycle or in past cycles, the past few cycles, Democrats have had the advantage. And so I think I don't have the exact number for you, but somewhere in the top 20-ish House races, there are very few that we could point to as having an ad advantage for Republicans. In most of the cases, Democrats are outwearing their opponents. All told, how much money are we going to spend on all of this advertising in 2024?

Open Secrets, some of our partners in election spending tracking, are projecting that the federal election spending will reach $15.9 billion, most costly. $15.9 billion. Wow. You know, I think most people will look at that and feel really cynical, right? Like, we're spending so much money on something that feels so icky and that can feel so manipulative. I mean, whether you're a Republican or Democrat listening to the ads that we've just listened to, it can feel...

sort of overly emotional and sort of awkward the way that they try to manipulate quote unquote voters. But, you know, I've talked to friends who live in countries that don't fund campaigns the way that we do that have much stricter limits on campaign spending. And they'll say, you know,

There's just a lot less knowledge about the candidates because there's so much less spending and there's so much less messaging and advertising. People don't really know. And that even if you're cynical about it, that is one of the main ways that people learn about candidates, ultimately the fight over the airwaves and what messages you put out.

And in an environment where both sides are spending a lot of money, they have the opportunity to deliver their message. And so for somebody who's so close to the issue, do you look at all of this and do you feel cynical or do you look at all of this and do you think this is how democracy works? Or maybe we can feel two emotions at the same time. Yes, there's definitely some of that. I mean, I would be lying if I didn't say to you that, you know, 15%

$0.9 million is a lot of money and that could be used in a lot of different good ways that maybe don't have to do with election advertising. But at the same time, I think political science generally, and I'm certainly at one with my discipline in this, that advertising is important in the sense that most citizens don't pay a lot of attention to politics. And so advertising is one way that campaigns can remind citizens that an election is coming up and that there are important issues that might affect

them. We do know that negative attacks in particular, they can induce information seeking. Maybe it's definitely the case that we live in a hyper-polarized environment now. And so these ads are going to be creating on citizens who don't like negativity. But it is the case generally that the more dollars that are spent, the more citizens do know about

the candidates. And at least in a democratically desirable universe where we would like to have more informed voters going to the ballot box, that's not necessarily a bad thing. That would be important. All right. Well, we're going to leave things there for today. Thank you so much for joining me, Erica.

Absolutely. Thanks so much for having me. My name is Galen Drew. Our producers are Shane McKeon and Cameron Chertavian, and our intern is Jayla Everett. You can get in touch by emailing us at podcasts at 538.com. You can also, of course, tweet us with any questions or comments. If you're a fan of the show, leave us a rating or review in the Apple Podcast Store or tell someone about us. Thanks for listening, and we will see you soon.