TV ad spending

RNC TV ad spending for Trump: $0

The national party breaks with tradition of spending millions on ads supporting its nominees.

By Kenneth P. Vogel and Alex Isenstadt

The Republican National Committee insists that it’s doing everything in its power to elect Donald Trump, but as Trump gets clobbered on the TV airwaves by his well-funded Democratic rival, the RNC has been conspicuously absent.

A POLITICO analysis of campaign finance records reveals that the committee has not spent anything on commercials boosting Trump since he emerged as the party’s likely nominee.

That’s a stark departure from recent elections. In 2008 and 2012, the RNC spent tens of millions of dollars on so-called independent expenditures — principally TV ads, but also direct mail and phone banks — supporting its nominees or attacking their Democratic rivals.

The lack of air cover has prompted grumbling from Trump aides and allies, many of whom believe that the RNC was never fully supportive of their candidate and that it’s now turning its back completely on the anti-establishment nominee as his poll numbers crater.

“The Democrats have an unprecedented and lopsided advertising advantage in this race like we have never seen before, and it is having a serious and negative effect,” said Curt Anderson, a former RNC political director who is helping a pro-Trump super PAC, Rebuilding America Now. “It is possible that Trump has sealed his fate at this point, but it is still a terrible mistake not to have $50 million dollars of advertising from the Republican Party exposing Hillary Clinton and keeping her numbers down,” said Anderson, who helped to lead the RNC’s independent expenditure effort in 2004 and 2008.

In 2004, the committee spent $18.2 million on independent expenditures — or IEs, in campaign parlance — boosting George W. Bush’s reelection bid. In 2008, the RNC’s IE spending surged to $53.5 million in support of John McCain’s campaign against Barack Obama. And in 2012, the RNC spent $42.4 million on IEs boosting Mitt Romney or opposing President Obama — with nearly 80 percent of the spending occurring before mid-October.

By contrast, this cycle the RNC has spent only $321,000 on independent expenditures attacking Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton. And all of that spending occurred last fall — before Trump had emerged as the leader for the GOP presidential nomination.

RNC chief of staff Katie Walsh said that the committee is not going to spend any more money this cycle on television ad IEs, but that the decision is completely unrelated to Trump.

Rather, she said it stems from a strategic calculation made soon after the 2012 election that “that is not an efficient use of party committee dollars to spend money on television.” Pointing to a report that assessed the shortcomings of Republican efforts in the 2012 election, she said RNC leaders determined that the party’s money was better invested in data-driven voter contact operations.

“We put people on the ground for three years, invested in communities, doing data and voter registration, so that when we had a nominee, we would be able to link up with that nominee and work together to insure that the nominee had the best field program that the Republican nominee has ever had,” said Walsh.

Campaigns and super PACs are both better suited to funding ads, she argued.

That’s because campaigns — unlike party committees — are legally entitled to lower advertising rates than outside groups. Additionally, campaigns are better positioned to make ads that reinforce their candidates’ message since party committees and super PACs are barred from coordinating their advertising strategies with the campaigns they’re trying to help.

“Why would we do an IE when we get a worse rate and worse placement than the campaign and the campaign has no idea what the messaging is going to be?” Walsh said.

Given the inefficiencies inherent in independent spending, she contended that it’s better done by super PACs, which — unlike party committees such as the RNC — can accept unlimited contributions from rich benefactors.

“A super PAC can start up tomorrow and raise $100 million immediately and put it on TV,” she said. “It’s much easier to place a last-minute TV buy than it is to go back and do three years worth of voter contact.”

That division of labor has worked well on the Democratic side.

Despite the Democratic National Committee’s lack of any IE spending, Clinton and groups supporting her had outspent Trump and his allies on ads $189 million to $50 million through the end of last week, according to advertising data compiled by the firm Advertising Analytics for NBC News.

A constellation of super PACs devoted to Trump have struggled to raise money. That’s partly because they got off to a late start and partly because there’s lingering distaste among elite GOP donors for Trump, who during his largely self-funded primary campaign eschewed super PACs and disparaged major donors as puppeteers.

The RNC’s move away from independent spending was predicated on having a more traditional nominee whose campaign spent heavily on its own advertising and whose relationships with major donors would compel them to write big checks to super PACs.

The RNC “had no way of knowing that Trump as the nominee wouldn’t have a significant paid media effort,” said Chris Mottola, a veteran Republican strategist who helped to oversee the committee’s 2012 ad campaign. “If you had predicted this election cycle, you be living beside a pool in Vegas.”

Given the way the election developed, an adviser to one of the pro-Trump super PACs said the RNC should have adapted and stepped in to help offset the advertising gap for the good of the whole party. “It’s shocking that the RNC wouldn’t do an IE for the candidate at the top of its ticket,” the adviser said. “It’s the single best way to help every Republican candidate down the ballot.”

But Mike Shields, a former RNC chief of staff who helped orchestrate the committee’s strategic shift away from television spending and towards ground operations, suggested Trump’s campaign and its supporters should have been aware of the shift, and responded accordingly.

“The RNC has been pretty clear for four years it wasn't going to do TV. We actually created a 4 year plan, and it has been executed wonderfully,” said Shields, who left the RNC last year to take the helm of a super PAC supporting the party’s House candidates.

“If the current nominee doesn't have enough money for TV, that is his responsibility, not the RNC's,” he said, adding “in the era of super PACs and billion dollar presidential campaigns, it made sense for the RNC to own the ground game and data — and leave TV to others. The RNC has exceeded its goals but it can't control what presidential, House or Senate candidates put on TV.”

The RNC says that its joint get-out-the-vote program with the Trump campaign had more than 1,000 staffers in the field last month, as compared to fewer than 900 working for Romney in October 2012.

Brad Parscale, Trump’s digital director, said the campaign’s get-out-the-vote effort with the RNC is “outperforming 2012 numbers in nearly every battleground state.” And he praised the RNC for providing “vital ground game infrastructure, data research and modeling, financial partnership and have staff integrated throughout our teams.”

But a handful of veteran GOP field organizers have privately questioned the strength of the RNC’s field program in recent interviews. Republicans trail Democrats organizationally in numerous swing states, with far fewer field staffers and canvassers to turn out votes for Trump.

And some Republicans suspect the abdication of the air war may stem less from a strategic shift to ground operations and more from the RNC’s financial position. Through the end of August, the committee had raised $231 million over the course of the election cycle, far short of the $356 million it had raised at the same point in the 2012 campaign.