Democratic super PACs are taking an unusual approach to this year’s presidential election: They’re not targeting former President Donald Trump.
A significant share of this cycle’s spending by pro-Democratic outside groups — who typically act as attack dogs — has gone to ads aimed at boosting positive perceptions of Vice President Kamala Harris. It’s a particularly striking shift after a majority of similar groups’ spending in both 2016 and 2020 was aimed at ramping up Trump’s negatives, a POLITICO analysis of ad spending found.
That stark contrast reflects a challenging reality: Harris began her abbreviated campaign in relative obscurity among many voters, sparking a frenzy to define her in the election’s final weeks. That’s particularly striking because this is Trump’s third straight presidential run — and even after his efforts to overturn the 2020 election results and his four indictments and conviction earlier this year, voters’ views of him are largely set.
There may be little Democrats can do to win over most voters to Trump. Instead, since Harris’s elevation, Democrats have bet that their dollars would be better spent reintroducing the vice president to voters, from the basics of her biography to defending immigration to trying to lay out her vision for the economy.
Meanwhile, Republican super PACs are sticking to the conventional playbook and only criticizing Harris, while barely mentioning Trump.
The result is that voters in key swing states, including Pennsylvania, North Carolina and Georgia, are being bombarded with far more content about Harris, both positive and negative, than about Trump.
“Voters have nothing, no information that they need to gather to inform their decision about Donald Trump,” said Evan Roth Smith, chief pollster for the Democratic firm Blueprint, which has conducted tests on the effectiveness of various presidential ads. “All the information that voters need, for the voters who haven’t made up their minds in this election, is about Kamala Harris.”
Take Philadelphia, the media market that has attracted the most presidential ad spending over the past three weeks. The most-aired ad in the metro area during that period is from the pro-Trump super PAC Make America Great Again Inc., and it goes after Harris on immigration — without mentioning Trump. By contrast, the most-aired ad is from a Democratic outside group called the pro-Harris steamroller FF PAC, and it has Harris talking about the middle class and contains just one sentence going after Trump on taxes.
Since Harris replaced President Joe Biden as the Democratic nominee, about 80 percent of outside spending by Democratic-leaning groups has gone toward supporting her candidacy rather than attacking Trump, according to POLITICO analysis of Federal Election Commission data. (Under federal law, all outside groups must report their campaign activities to the FEC in near real time when they attempt to influence an election. They must classify spending as supporting or opposing a specific candidate.)
That’s a stark difference from previous election cycles: During the same period in 2020, about 60 percent of Democratic outside spending went to countering Trump. And in 2016, 87 percent of Democratic outside spending in the late summer and early fall went to pushing negative content about Trump.
It also stands in stark contrast to the approach of outside GOP groups, which have stuck to the traditional attack role of super PACs and spent nearly 90 percent of their independent spending on attacks on Harris since she replaced Biden.
The anti-Trump content hasn’t gone away: Harris’ campaign has run ads that attempted to tie the former president to Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation’s unpopular policy framework that Trump has sought to distance himself from. Last week, an ad was also released featuring a survivor of childhood sexual abuse talking about the importance of abortion rights and blaming Trump for state bans.
But the overall Democratic message flooding the airwaves is not that kind of onslaught. The share of anti-Trump content is significantly lower than even a few months ago, when Biden topped the Democratic ticket and both candidates were well established in the public eye.
American Bridge 21st Century, which oversees the second-largest pro-Democratic super PAC active in this cycle’s presidential election, has run mostly negative ads for most of the year. Its first contrasting ads, part of a strategy to target female voters who are less likely to have abortions, launched earlier this month.
The anti-Trump ads, which featured a veteran talking about Trump and the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection at the U.S. Capitol, were part of a strategy to reach voters who pay less attention to politics. The goal was to remind them of Trump’s negative attributes, said Pat Dennis, president of American Bridge. The strategy complemented positive ads about Harris from her campaign and other groups, he said, in part because most voters didn’t need to know more about Trump.
“Anyone who watches CNN once a week or picks up a newspaper that deals with political reporting generally has a pretty good memory for why they don’t like Donald Trump,” Dennis said.
