Biden Launches Ad Blitz to Counter Voter Worries on Age, Economy

Jordan Fabian, Stephanie Lai and Bill Allison
·4 min read
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(Bloomberg) -- Joe Biden’s reelection team is outspending his Republican rivals on advertising, with a multimillion-dollar campaign a year before the 2024 election, highlighting the president’s challenges with voters.

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At 80, Biden is the oldest-ever US president and polls show Americans harbor serious doubts about his fitness to serve another four years. Despite signing several bills into law funding infrastructure, semiconductor innovation and renewable energy production, most people don’t know about Biden’s achievements and many worry about the US economy.

Those problems help explain why Biden is flooding the airwaves sooner than two recent predecessors running for reelection, Donald Trump and Barack Obama.

Biden, the Democratic National Committee and an allied super political action committee have spent $39 million on advertising through Nov. 2, according to data from AdImpact, a firm tracking ad spending in elections. That’s more than the $31 million Trump, the frontrunner for the GOP nomination, and his associated super PAC have spent. Florida Governor Ron DeSantis’s team has shelled out the most, $36 million, of all the GOP primary candidates.

Biden’s latest round of advertising spots, which began airing in August, appear to address his perceived weaknesses. One shows Biden donning his signature aviator sunglasses, striding through wartime Kyiv, painting a strong image of the president that contrasts with critics’ claims he is too feeble for the job. Another ad highlights the ways Biden has worked to lower prescription drug and health-care costs, provisions of the sprawling Inflation Reduction Act he signed last year.

“These early investments means that we’re able to test the effectiveness and reach of our messaging and actually find out if it’s resonating with a coalition of voters that we need to win,” Rob Flaherty, Biden’s deputy campaign manager, told reporters Thursday. “Voters need to learn about policies, but when they do, they love them.”

Another data point behind the large advertising spending: the president’s popularity. Biden has an approval rating around 39%, below where both Trump and Obama were at this point in the reelection cycle, according to FiveThirtyEight’s poll tracker.

Despite his low polling numbers, Biden was buoyed by state-level elections Tuesday night that saw Democrats win both chambers in Virginia’s legislature and the Kentucky governor’s race, and Ohio voters back a measure protecting abortion rights.

Biden’s campaign is buying time in Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Florida.

The ads are not designed to immediately turn around Biden’s poor approval ratings, according to a senior campaign adviser. Instead, they are meant to foreshadow a more aggressive communications plan closer to the election that is expected to total nearly $1 billion, said the person, who requested anonymity to discuss strategy.

Republicans say the heavy investment from Biden’s political operation this early in the campaign is a sign they are worried about how close the race is.

“Democrats know Biden is weak so they are investing early in an attempt to save him,” Karoline Leavitt, a spokeswoman for Trump’s allied super PAC, Make America Great Again Inc., said in a statement.

By comparison, Trump and his allied groups spent $27 million on ads through this point in the 2020 election, according to AdImpact. Their data doesn’t date back to Obama’s reelection, but Federal Election Commission records show his political operation spent roughly $14 million over the same period in 2011 on television, cable, radio and online advertising.

While Biden’s campaign is still taking shape, the deep investment in advertising reflects the size of its war chest. Biden’s campaign outraised all other candidates, including Trump, bringing in $71.3 million in the third quarter. The Biden campaign said in early November it had $91 million cash on hand. That puts Biden at a distinct advantage to Trump who reported having nearly $37.5 million on hand at the end of September.

The pro-Biden advertising campaigns have centered around swing states and metropolitan regions with large communities of Hispanic and Black voters, groups that helped hand Biden the presidency, but among whom he is currently struggling.

“Building on the strength of the 2020 Biden-Harris coalition and the gains made among targeted voters in 2022 will be crucial to our victory in November 2024,” Biden campaign manager Julie Chavez Rodriguez wrote in a memo released Nov. 2.

Ads featuring Biden have tested well with voters, as do testimonials from people who have benefited from his policies, said the campaign adviser who spoke on condition of anonymity. The biggest portion of the ad budget is being spent on airing the commercial highlighting prescription drug costs.

The numbers from Biden and his Republican challengers also reveal a broader propensity to spend on advertising this year.

Presidential campaigns, super PACs and parties have collectively spent $207 million in ad buys so far compared with $146 million at this point in the 2020 cycle. Spending on all political advertising is estimated to reach a record $10.2 billion this cycle, according to AdImpact projections.

--With assistance from Justin Sink.

(Updates with Flaherty comment in the sixth paragraph)

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