Clinton allies dig

Clinton allies dig in for scorched-earth ad campaign

Democrats increasingly believe there's only one way to combat Donald Trump's cable news domination.

By Gabriel Debenedetti

Hillary Clinton’s campaign team and her allies don’t expect Donald Trump to stop dominating national cable news or occupying television studio couches anytime soon. They just hope to own the commercial breaks.

Accustomed to seeing images of Trump plaster television screens, Democrats are preparing for a scorched-earth general election in which they increasingly believe they’ll have to carpet-bomb the presumptive GOP nominee over the swing state airwaves to combat his singular ability to get in front of a camera.

While the efficacy of television ads in elections has come under question as more refined and cost-efficient methods of reaching voters have surfaced in recent years, strategists close to the pro-Clinton effort believe the real estate tycoon’s mastery of so-called earned media presents a new kind of challenge — one that demands meeting him where he lives, before anything else.

Such a campaign will be enormously expensive: The likelihood that Trump will maintain his singular hold on TV programming in the coming months has convinced Democrats — who were especially frustrated by two days of wall-to-wall coverage of his visit to Washington earlier this month, complete with live video of his parked plane — that they’ll need to outspend him.

David Plouffe, Barack Obama’s 2008 campaign manager and now an informal advisor to Clinton’s political team, revealed to a group of fundraisers at a closed-door meeting in San Francisco last week that the goal was to follow the record-smashing lead set by Obama in the summer of 2012, when he defined Mitt Romney before the GOP had a chance to define him, a campaign donor in the room told POLITICO. The idea, in Plouffe’s words, is to “stick the knife in” early.

Paid ads are expected to be just one facet of the public war on Trump, which will also be waged on social media, through surrogate appearances, and with a close focus on generating positive local media coverage for Clinton in swing state media markets where local TV drives the daily discussion for rank-and-file voters, not cable television.

“Have you looked at the ratings for cable news in this country? It’s minuscule. The elites pay attention, but 120, 130 million people voted in 2012. There are tens of millions of people who will never see the cable coverage. For those people, the paid media will be important,” explained Democratic ad-maker Eric Adelstein.

“The campaign knows it’s going to be fighting the wars on cable television, but you really have to fight the wars on local television,” added Tom Nides, the deputy secretary of state under Clinton who remains close to her. “You can do something on cable, but there’s not a lot of people in Colorado watching Morning Joe."

Clinton’s ad onslaught will also include positive messaging. Her allies are keenly aware that as negative as the public view is of Trump, the likely Democratic nominee also has a historically low favorability rating. Her campaign must figure out how to convince voters to cast votes for her, not just against Trump, explained one party operative who was closely involved with the ad battle in 2012, so her campaign and ancillary organizations will also aim to paint Clinton in a positive light — even if the overwhelming focus is on tearing Trump down.

“You don’t want to saturate the market with just negative, negative, negative. That can backfire if you oversaturate,” said Jimmy Siegel, a New York ad maker who worked for Clinton's 2008 campaign. “If this race is going to be closer than they expect, she’s got some work to do on shoring up her positives."

“No one’s really been able to do a good job with the campaign to show people that real side of her, and unfortunately the public perception of her is extremely different,” he added. “It’s not a matter of reinventing her. It’s a matter of showing people who she is. If you show the real Hillary you would do a lot of good for her."

Clinton’s campaign itself hasn’t revealed how much it intends to spend on advertising, and many Democratic strategists and allies are still puzzling through their budgets and creative plans. But it’s clear that much of the load will be carried by outside groups like Priorities USA Action, the main pro-Clinton super PAC. The Priorities offensive has already started, with anti-Trump spots on air in four swing states at the moment — an investment that other Democrats expect to be just the beginning of a broader, multi-faceted blitz that will include digital, broadcast, cable and radio components.

So far, Priorities has committed at least $96 million to a non-stop television effort to define Trump as dangerous, divisive, and a con-man in seven swing states from now through November. In 2012, the same group spent a total of roughly $65 million against Mitt Romney.

Clinton’s campaign and other outside groups have been raising money for months — and in Priorities’ case, the super PAC has been laying down reservations that will give them more ad space than a group that purchases it later in the year. That’s expected to give Democrats a considerable head-start in their assault unless Trump and his super PACs can rapidly ramp up their finance operations.

Priorities, for example, has spent four months running swing state focus groups to test its messaging while Trump battled for the GOP nomination. The presumptive Republican nominee — who until this month refused to raise large amounts of money, and had no super PAC — will thus begin the general election campaign a few steps behind.

And the campaign itself has done some spadework for the general election. While it hasn’t put money behind any general election spots, the digital team has been releasing web videos stinging Trump on a daily basis. Such web clips serve as a way for the campaign to test negative messages — like Tuesday’s “If Donald Wins, You Lose” — that get replayed on news shows.

People aligned with the Clinton campaign note that their allied groups are already sending tacit messages about preferred attack lines for talking points, web videos and other non-paid communications. When Priorities’ chief strategist this month told POLITICO that he didn’t like calling Trump “risky" because that implied an upside to his candidacy, it was read within Democratic circles as pushback to the description of Trump that had been coming from the campaign in recent days.

Clinton's recent uptick in fundraising events and Trump's first fundraiser on Tuesday suggest that both camps understand that a full-saturation ad campaign is sure to be a wallet-draining proposition for both sides. If 2012 is any guide, the price of entry is close to a half-billion dollars — Romney's team and allied GOP groups spent over $490 million on advertising, compared to Obama's roughly $400 million.

Trump, who showed little hesitation in brutally bashing his rivals with negative spots during the primary season, may already be gearing up for the ad wars. A campaign believed to be his requested ad rates in Florida, Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Virginia earlier this month, according to a media buyer.

Clinton’s allies insist it’s nothing that an aggressive, take-no-prisoners paid media campaign can’t overcome.

"It's not necessary to reinvent the wheel," said Siegel. "He's a very vulnerable candidate in terms of negatives. Those should be pointed out, and those are pretty persuasive for the population."