I don’t want to ruin the celebratory joy some people take at Trump finally making it official that Breitbart News is nothing but an arm of the Trump campaign, but there is still some reality to deal with here.
To say that Trump is running an unconventional campaign is to put it mildly. This one will be published in books with a chapter, “How Not To Run A Presidential Campaign.”
There’s been an announcement this morning, the Trump campaign for the first time this election season, will be running his first TV ads. Any television ads you’ve seen thus far are bought and paid for by anti-Hillary or pro-Trump super PAC’s. Here’s the skinny on ad general campaign spending:
Maybe you’ve heard — there is going to be a pretty big election in 84 days. The candidates’ advertising machines have been kicked into full gear: Hillary Clinton’s campaign has spent $61 million on ads, followed by the Green Party’s Jill Stein with $189,000, and finally the Libertarian nominee Gary Johnson, who has spent $15,000.
That is about $61,204,000 spent by candidates hoping you’ll vote for them instead of Donald Trump. And Trump’s defense? Well, it’s pretty inexpensive: He has spent $0 on ads so far. Outside pro-Trump groups have spent a combined $12.4 million in advertising, compared to the $42 million spent by outside groups backing Clinton.
At this point, Trump has more or less surrendered the airwaves entirely to his competition. Clinton has dominated advertising in battleground states for two months with an almost 9-to-1 advantage in ad spending when outside groups are factored in, NBC News reports.
Some people say the value of ads are overstated. I happen to agree they’re not as important as they used to be. In the 80’s and 90’s television ads provided us with information the news media did not. Nowadays we have access to all that information via the internet and 24 hour cable news. It is rare to see a television ad and say, “I didn’t know that.”
In any event, combine this with bringing about Trumpbart officially, and the dumpster fire is just going to get worse.
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