Clinton leading Trump in ad numbers
Hillary Clinton has a massive ad advantage over Donald Trump with less than two weeks to go before the election.
Media Monitors, which tracks broadcasts ads, looked at all of the ads that ran for and against both Clinton and Trump since the day each clinched their party’s nomination and provided USA TODAY with the data. The big takeaway: There are significantly more positive ads for Clinton than Trump.
There have been approximately 55,000 pro-Trump ads run since May 26, 2016, which is the day Trump secured enough delegates to clinch the GOP nomination. But there have been almost 58,000 negative ads against him in that same time period.
Meanwhile, there have been almost 140,000 ads in support of Clinton and just 13,000 ads against her since June 6.
So what does this mean?
“What it means is that the Trump campaign believed that they were getting so much free publicity … because every time he would talk people would put him on the air,” said Dwight Douglas, vice president of marketing for Media Monitors. He believes that Trump campaign didn’t see the urgency in buying ad slots — which he thinks was a mistake.
Douglas — who still believes ads are some of the most effective forms of political messaging — said using free media doesn’t let the candidate “control the narrative.”
“There’s a way to use selective social media and there is a way to use advertising and there’s a way to use a commercial that’s very convincing — and that’s an art,” Douglas continued.
Douglas said that using only social media and targeted marketing is problematic because you don’t expand the base.
“What happens is those things tend to get filtered out by your perspective — if you’re a Hillary person you’re going to get all her mail,” Douglas said.
Travis Ridout, a co-director of the Wesleyan Media Project, another group that tracks broadcast ads said that Clinton’s ad advantage is “unprecedented”
“I don’t know when the last time was we’ve seen something like that in a presidential race,” he told USA TODAY.
Ridout said the vast difference is likely due to a lack of funds, and the biggest issue is lack of money from groups supporting Trump.
There are three super PACs that have provided just over 3,000 ads for Trump and the National Rifle Association has put up the money for almost 6,000 ads, but the rest come from the Trump campaign.
“Mitt Romney didn’t have as much money as Obama back in 2012, but he got support from the Republican Party. He got support from a lot of outside groups,” Ridout said. “The outside groups just aren’t showing up for Trump.”
Clinton’s campaign has also provided the majority of her positive ads ads, 137,000 of them, but she also has help from more than a half dozen PACs. The PACs supporting Clinton have generated 58,000 negative ads against Trump.
Meanwhile the NRA and three PACs backing Trump have pumped out 13,000 negative Clinton ads. The NRA paid for a significant number of those — nearly 5,000.