With three months before the presidential election, Joe Biden’s campaign is planning a new advertising push in Pennsylvania and more than a dozen other states as it pursues what it says is a strategy to create “multiple pathways” to get enough electoral votes to win the White House.
The effort includes $280 million in TV and digital adverting in states President Trump won in 2016 but where Democrats have had success in previous elections – including Pennsylvania, Florida and Michigan – but also Georgia and Texas where voters have chosen Republicans in presidential contests for decades. Georgia last voted for a Democrat by choosing Bill Clinton in 1992 and Texas last chose Democrat Jimmy Carter in 1976.
Other states in which the Biden campaign is planning a new advertising push are Arizona, Colorado, Iowa, Ohio, Minnesota, Nevada, New Hampshire, North Carolina, Virginia and Wisconsin.
Biden campaign manager Jen O’Malley Dillon told reporters Monday evening that the former vice president’s campaign is aiming to keep as many states on the map as possible.
In 2016, then-candidate Donald Trump beat former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in Pennsylvania by about 44,000 votes – less than 1%.
The Trump campaign is also planning a new round of ads, planning to air them in the early voting states of Arizona, Florida, Georgia and North Carolina.
The President’s re-election campaign said this week that it had paused ads for several days “while undertaking a review of advertising tactics and has resumed with a smarter, more strategic approach that recognizes the staggered calendar presented in the 2020 election.”
