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Posted on Oct 27, 2024 / Politics / USA

The presidential race between Republican candidate Donald Trump and Democratic candidate Kamala Harris remains extremely unpredictable 10 days before the vote.

Mathematical models consider the race to be completely equal, with Trump barely noticeable ahead in the last weeks. Moreover, the ratings of both candidates have hardly changed.

In this situation, their campaigns are left to fight for a tiny share of the votes in seven swing states - the outcome of the election will likely be decided by tens or hundreds of thousands of voters. The main tool that both Harris and Trump are using in this fight is television advertising: they have already spent almost two billion dollars on it, buying 904 thousand impressions. In total, taking into account the expenses of activist groups and candidates for Congress, the broadcast of TV commercials during the current campaign will cost American politicians about ten billion dollars.

In general, Harris's campaign has a fundraising advantage across the country, and spends twice as much on advertising as Trump's campaign.

Studies do not provide a clear answer about the effectiveness of these expenses - some scientists note that advertising does not increase turnout of supporters, while others believe that in an equal situation, TV advertising can increase a candidate's chances of winning. Moreover, the effectiveness of commercials can vary several times, but it is not related to their content. Because of this, the Trump and Harris teams are filming hundreds of videos: they can attack the competitor, talk about their candidate, have positive or negative content, use completely different stylistic techniques - and all this with the expectation that some of the chosen moves will work. Measuring the effect of the first shows, the headquarters begin to repeat the videos over and over again that, in their opinion, worked better.

As a result, the most frequently broadcast Trump video was a video in which Trump himself is not present: for a whole minute (instead of the traditional 30 seconds for the format), the screen shows fragments of Harris's speeches in which she talks about "Bidenomics". The video released by the Trump team is intended to create a negative impression of Harris, since "Bidenomics" did not succeed in the eyes of voters - Americans still consider inflation to be one of the main problems.

In turn, Kamala Harris's campaign invested in broadcasting an eclectic video, in which viewers are told in half a minute that Harris is a representative of the middle class; they mention that she worked part-time at McDonald's; they briefly recount her election platform and at the same time criticize Trump for cutting taxes for the richest.

Each advertising video ends with a phrase from the candidate: he says his name and says that he supports this message.

The candidates' campaigns are producing more and more diverse videos, including in order to reach new groups of voters. For example, here is a video from Harris's campaign in Spanish - it tells the story of Yamelisa Taveras, a girl from Pennsylvania who praises the Democrats for introducing a price cap on insulin.

Sometimes the ads are dedicated to specific topics that are important for swing states: for example, fracking, a method of extracting oil by saturating formations with water, which is popular in Pennsylvania. The method is considered dangerous for the environment, and in 2019, Harris, trying to gain a more left-wing position in the Democratic primaries, promised to ban it. She has now abandoned this idea, but the Trump campaign has dedicated an entire series of videos to her statements at the time.

Harris's previous statements are one of the main targets of attacks for the Trump campaign. For example, in 2019, she said that prisoners in American prisons are entitled to budgetary assistance when making a transgender transition. Trump's video, based on this statement, tries to present Harris's position as a threat to American society.

Harris has had to answer questions about this statement from five years ago in many interviews. According to her, it is simply a requirement of the law: prisoners must receive medical care. In addition, such a policy towards transgender people was in effect during Trump's presidency, and in the last two years, only two prisoners have made a transition in American prisons. However, the Republican campaign spent $29 million to broadcast a series of transphobic videos.

In response, Harris' campaign seized on Trump's comments about Detroit, Michigan's largest city.

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