Joe Biden’s campaign has moved to capitalize on the enormous energy reflected in the nationwide protests against racism and police brutality with the biggest online spending of his candidacy, pouring nearly $5 million into Facebook ads alone in recent days.
Biden spent about the same amount on Facebook over just a few days last week as he had in the first 10 months of his candidacy.
On Thursday alone, he spent $1.6 million on the platform, more than triple President Trump’s single-day record, according to company data.
The staggering sums are a sure sign, according to digital strategists, that people are responding to Biden’s ads — and donating, too.
The most heavily run Facebook ads ask people to sign a petition “condemning” Trump, and feature a photo of the president walking past a line of security officers in riot gear outside the White House last week.
They accuse Trump of fanning “the flames of white supremacy, hatred and violence.” Other petition ads feature images of sign-waving protesters outside the United States Capitol.
The initial wave of Biden ads set a goal of persuading one million people to sign the petition; that goal had jumped to 2.5 million by Saturday, with current ads suggesting that more than 1.2 million people have already signed.
The ads are running nationally, not just in battleground states, and appear intended mostly to harvest the names, email addresses, ZIP codes and mobile numbers of potential supporters.
This information is very valuable: Once these new supporters are in Biden’s database, the campaign can return to them to ask for money over and over through November.
Meanwhile, Priorities USA Action, a major Democratic super PAC, is out in Arizona and other states with new TV and digital ads attacking Trump — totaling $4 million in spending.
The ads — slamming Trump for his response to the coronavirus pandemic and the ongoing protests over the death of George Floyd by Minneapolis police — will also air in Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Michigan, part of an existing buy in those states.
But the month-long expansion into Arizona — after the super PAC briefly aired TV ads there in March — reflects a shift in recent public polling, which has showed the state increasingly competitive.
A Fox News poll released last week found Joe Biden leading Trump in the state by 4 percentage points, 46 percent to 42 percent.
In recent weeks, the Trump campaign has also been sporadically airing TV ads in Arizona, a state that hasn’t backed a Democratic presidential nominee since 1996.
That was the only time Democrats won the state in the past 17 presidential elections.
The new TV ad slams Trump for mishandling the pandemic and the economic fallout, which has totaled more than 40 million unemployed by late May.
“In times of crisis, we look to our president to lead, but Donald Trump failed to listen to experts and made the coronavirus epidemic worse,” the ad’s narrator says.
“As Americans stand up for justice, Donald Trump divides and inflames,” the narrator continues, flashing footage of Trump’s photo-op in front of St. John’s Church, after protesters were forcefully dispersed last week.
The super PAC also released a digital ad, accusing Trump of “fanning the flames” of crisis in the United States.
“This is a seminal moment,” said Jason Rosenbaum, a top digital strategist on Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign and a former official at Google. He said that rapid spending spikes like Biden’s are nearly always “an indication that grass-roots donors are donating money at extremely high levels.”