After wielding a bullhorn to shape Republican primaries, the former president has let other groups dominate the airwaves and cover the high cost of commercials.
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Former President Donald J. Trump with Blake Masters, the Republican nominee for Senate in Arizona, whose campaign has been a beneficiary of Mr. Trump’s ad spending.
The ads are running in rural, white stretches of Nevada, in Ohio’s biggest cities and in the Pennsylvania suburbs. In Arizona and Georgia, they’re aimed at viewers of the Hallmark and History channels, and a number of sports networks.
In each spot, a husky-voiced narrator bluntly and ominously makes the case for voting Republican: “Chaos at the border, crime in our neighborhoods, a collapsing economy,” he tells Georgians, pinning an unpopular Democratic president to an incumbent Democratic senator, Raphael Warnock. “Biden and Warnock did that.”
All of which would be utterly unremarkable for ads supporting Republican candidates in the heat of the midterm homestretch, except for one thing: They’re being paid for by Donald J. Trump’s super PAC.
Not one of the ads shows Mr. Trump’s face or even mentions his name. None mention election fraud, the issue he has insisted for two years is the most pressing facing the nation.
About the only giveaway that the former president’s brimming-over war chest paid for the ads is a familiar line in several spots — “take our country back” — and the name of the group responsible: Make America Great Again Inc.
The uncharacteristically bashful advertising blitz by Mr. Trump represents his first significant financial commitment to helping push a Republican Party he has remade in his image over the finish line of the general election.
By Mr. Trump’s famously stingy standards when it comes to supporting other candidates, the $13.2 million he has poured into television ads since Oct. 7 is an extraordinary act of Republican solidarity.
The State of the 2022 Midterm Elections
Election Day is Tuesday, Nov. 8.
- Bracing for a Red Wave: Republicans were already favored to flip the House. Now they are looking to run up the score by vying for seats in deep-blue states.
- Pennsylvania Senate Race: The debate performance by Lt. Gov. John Fetterman, who is still recovering from a stroke, has thrust questions of health to the center of the pivotal race and raised Democratic anxieties.
- G.O.P. Inflation Plans: Republicans are riding a wave of anger over inflation as they seek to recapture Congress, but few economists expect their proposals to bring down rising prices.
- Polling Analysis: If these poll results keep up, everything from a Democratic hold in the Senate and a narrow House majority to a total G.O.P. rout becomes imaginable, writes Nate Cohn, The Times’s chief political analyst.
Put in another context, however, it amounts to about 15 percent of his political treasury, less than the $16 million the National Republican Senatorial Committee has spent on the same Senate races over the same period, and about one-fifth of the $71 million being pumped into those contests by the Senate Leadership Fund, the super PAC aligned with Senator Mitch McConnell, the Republican minority leader.
Because Mr. Trump’s entry to the midterm ad wars is so late, the costs are higher, limiting his reach in the races he is trying to sway. That leaves him in the unusual role of a supporting actor in the pivotal closing days of the campaign.
Even though Mr. Trump has a war chest of more than $130 million, his ad campaign has been defined by his attempts to avoid expensive ad rates while letting other Republican groups dominate the airwaves. Ad rates are driven by supply and demand, and those costs typically skyrocket at the end of an election season when campaigns and political groups try to flood the airwaves.
Some Republicans said the former president should be doing more. During the third quarter of this year, Mr. Trump raised nearly $25 million online — or about 15 percent of every dollar given on WinRed, the leading online donation processing site for Republicans. But Mr. Trump’s television budget is only a little more than half of what he has spent on advertising to solicit more donors to his political operation.
In Arizona, where Blake Masters, the Republican candidate for Senate, has been outspent on television by more than 10-to-1 by Senator Mark Kelly, the Democratic incumbent, Republicans have been waiting for Mr. Trump to deploy resources in the state, said Barrett Marson, a Republican strategist there.
“There’s no doubt the race is closing in the Republican direction, but I don’t know if the help from Trump is too little, too late,” Mr. Marson said.
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Still, even Republicans critical of Mr. Trump’s total spending praised the substance of his advertising campaign. Republican consultants and Senate campaign advisers said the spots had aligned with candidates’ messages, targeted the correct markets and should help drive Trump supporters to the polls.
“The ads have been tactically effective, and the messages have been very good,” said Scott Jennings, a Republican strategist. “I would have loved to see Trump unload his entire PAC, but it’s good that they jumped in.”
The ads vary in tone and issue from state to state. The group has targeted five Senate races and added a new spot this week to support Tudor Dixon, the Republican candidate for governor in Michigan.
The pragmatism of Mr. Trump’s ad campaign is a significant shift in his political strategy from earlier this year, when his primary-season endorsements were characterized by attempts to consolidate his personal political influence.
Although that approach has been absent from his ads, it hasn’t disappeared from the campaign trail.
At a rally on Saturday in Texas, Mr. Trump made another lengthy argument that the election had been stolen, a position from which Republicans have distanced themselves on debate stages.
Last week, the former president also signaled that personal loyalty remained a top priority when he attacked Joe O’Dea, the Republican candidate for Senate in Colorado, who has said he does not want Mr. Trump to run again in 2024. This week, Mr. Trump publicly complained when Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida endorsed Mr. O’Dea, calling it a “big mistake.”
Mr. Trump has increasingly teased another presidential campaign. Speaking at the Saturday rally about a third consecutive White House bid, he said that he would “probably have to do it again.”
As he drops such hints, he has made several key moves in his political operation.
The new executive director of the super PAC is Taylor Budowich, who has become a close adviser to Mr. Trump after working as his communications director for the past year. Mr. Trump also brought in Chris LaCivita, a longtime Republican operative, as the super PAC’s senior strategist.
A newcomer to Mr. Trump’s political orbit, Mr. LaCivita has been in charge of making TV ads, a crucial role for a former president who takes an outsize interest in marketing and is known to weigh in on each frame of a 30-second political spot.
When Mr. Trump was considering adding Mr. LaCivita to his team, he told people that he wanted “the Swift boat guys” — a reference to the ads that Mr. LaCivita worked on during the 2004 presidential race that attacked Senator John Kerry’s record as a Swift boat commander during the Vietnam War.
More than half of the super PAC’s total has been spent airing ads on cable and satellite television, which cost significantly less than broadcast television ads. Ad buyers said a general rule of thumb was that it takes about eight or 10 cable spots to be seen by as many viewers as one broadcast ad.
The Trump super PAC spent exclusively on cable and satellite television in Arizona and Georgia, while its budgets in Michigan, Nevada, Ohio and Pennsylvania included more broadcast purchases. The Senate Leadership Fund spent about 80 percent of its TV budget on broadcast ads.
ImageIn Ohio, ads from Mr. Trump’s super PAC that aim to help J.D. Vance, the Republican candidate for Senate, have aired in urban markets like Cleveland and Columbus.Credit…Maddie McGarvey for The New York Times
In Nevada, the super PAC’s broadcast ads have predominantly played in the Reno market, which reaches much of the state’s white, rural population — and is significantly cheaper than the bigger Las Vegas market. In Ohio, the spots have run in Cleveland and Columbus, the state’s biggest urban markets, where J.D. Vance’s Republican campaign for Senate has not aired as many ads as in the rest of the state.
In Georgia, Nevada and Ohio, the ads were designed to energize conservatives by attacking Democratic candidates, blaming them for the rising cost of food and gas while painting them as tools of party leaders and an unpopular president.
In Pennsylvania, the super PAC’s initial ad focused on crime, an issue that Republicans have used to try to appeal to suburban women and other swing voters.
The Pennsylvania spot opened with an image of scissors on a brick walkway, covered in dark blood as the male narrator attacks Lt. Gov. John Fetterman, the Democratic candidate for Senate, for unsuccessfully supporting a commuted sentence for a man convicted of murdering a woman with a pair of scissors.
“John Fetterman wants ruthless killers, muggers and rapists back on our streets — and he wants them back now,” the narrator says as the spot closes with an image of Mr. Fetterman wearing a hooded sweatshirt with his arms crossed and a scowl on his face.
Source: nytimes.com
