Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump (L) and Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris (L).
Credit: Reuters File Photos
Harrisburg, Pa: The closing arguments have been delivered by former President Donald Trump in New York’s Madison Square Garden and by Vice President Kamala Harris on the Ellipse in Washington, with the White House as her backdrop.
But in the final days of the tightly drawn presidential campaign, the last messages to voters in the seven swing states that will decide the election continue to flood televisions, computers and smartphones.
From Harris and her supporters, those messages cover a mix of kitchen-table issues on the economy and taxes, the fate of legal abortion and the dangers posed by a return of Trump to the White House.
For Trump and his allies, one message dominates: Defeating Harris is a matter of life and death. Your death, to be specific.
“How will your family survive another four years if you may not be able to survive the night?” asks one ad from the super political action committee Right for America. It received a $7 million run in October.
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An analysis by The New York Times and the tracking firm AdImpact of the largest advertising purchases in the final weeks of the campaign found clear patterns. The five largest purchases from four corners — the Trump campaign, the Harris campaign and the biggest political action committees supporting each of them — show distinct tactics.
Harris and her supporters communicate multiple messages, while Trump and his supporters mainly stick to variations on the theme of fear. The Harris campaign and attendant PACs tend to use the candidate’s voice and speeches, trusting that she has attained a level of trust and likability that can win over the few undecided voters.
Ads promoting Trump’s campaign rarely use his voice, relying instead on narrators.
And in the final days of the campaign, both candidates will air much more sweeping ads that invoke patriotism — without mentioning the opposition by name.
Here is a breakdown of the campaigns’ closing issues and themes, as seen by voters in the key battlegrounds.
Fear
The Harris campaign and its allies have relatively modest advertising runs that use former aides and generals who served under Trump to frame him as “too big a risk for America” and “unhinged, unstable and unchecked.”
But the former president and his supporting groups are in a different realm of horror. In advertisement after advertisement, supposedly dangerous illegal immigrants flooding over the border are shown in grainy or tinted images. Frightening mug shots accompany the darkest of warnings: “Americans will continue to lose their lives,” intones one ad from Make America Great Again Inc., a $9.2 million buy that ran 4,101 times over 11 days in late October. In an even larger ad blitz, 5,914 airings in just six late-October days for $19.3 million, the same group said that “innocent victims” of Harris’ “border crisis” were “bludgeoned, raped, strangled, stabbed, shot and murdered.”
“Kamala created the border crisis,” the ad asserts. “She won’t fix it.”
In the largest Republican ad buy of the final weeks, MAGA Inc. has spent nearly $23 million for 8,560 airings of an ad that tells of “a little girl” who “was raped and buried alive,” yet “Kamala allowed convicted sex offenders to live near schools and parks.”
Taxes and the economy
Polls have consistently shown that voters are mainly concerned with the economy and inflation, issues that have been seen as Harris’ weaknesses and that Democrats have been trying to address. Future Forward, the main super PAC supporting the vice president, has spent by far its largest amount, more than $52 million, to air two ads focused mainly on kitchen-table issues.
The largest of these spots, with 33,000 airings, features a man who identifies himself as a lifelong Republican, lamenting the tariff that Trump has promised to impose on all imported goods — “It’ll make everything more expensive for regular people all while giving tax breaks to billionaires” — before praising Harris’ promise to cut taxes for the middle class. Just behind that, at $25.4 million in the last two weeks of October, is a spot that features a woman, Rebecca F., a one-time Trump voter. She is watching a tablet as Trump tells his audience at a fundraiser that they are “rich as hell” and will get a tax cut.
“Donald Trump wants to give tax breaks to billionaires,” she says in 28,536 airings, “but Kamala Harris has plans to help us. She’s going to crack down on price gouging and cut taxes for working people like me.”
Right for America is running one positive economic ad, in English and Spanish, extolling Trump for his promise to eliminate taxes on tips, Social Security and overtime.
“The people who work overtime are among the hardest working citizens in our country, and for too long, no one in Washington has been looking out for them,” Trump intones in a rare use of his voice in the ads. At $7 million, it is toward the bottom of the largest late buys.
Another ad, with about $7.7 million behind it for the closing weeks, hits Harris hard on inflation. Financed by Restoration PAC, the advertisement appears to be aimed at Black voters. “They are killing us without killing us,” a Black woman near tears asserts.
Abortion
Since the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade in 2022, voters have been rewarding Democrats, in midterm and special elections, for standing by the right to an abortion. The Harris campaign is pressing that advantage. Its second and third largest closing ad buys — $17.5 million and more than 47,600 airings in the last two weeks of October — are on abortion rights.
The largest airing, showed nearly 32,000 times, is the return of Hadley Duvall, the young woman who helped Gov. Andy Beshear of Kentucky win reelection last year with her wrenching story of being sexually abused and impregnated at age 12. This time, Duvall speaks of the “64,000 pregnancies from rape” in states that have banned abortion since the repeal of Roe. “Trump did this,” she says.
The other features Trump boasting about his role in repealing the constitutional right to an abortion — he appointed three of the conservative Supreme Court justices who helped make up the majority — with a series of women warning of restrictions to come if he is returned to the White House.
Anti-trans attacks
Among the Trump campaign’s top four ad buys in October have been attacks on Harris’ past stances on rights for transgender people.
Republicans have seized on a response by Harris to a question about medical care for incarcerated people on a 2019 American Civil Liberties Union candidate questionnaire, as well as comments by Harris that she “pushed” the state corrections department “to provide gender-transition surgery to state inmates” while serving as California attorney general from 2011 to 2017. (Trump appointees at the federal Bureau of Prisons also provided gender-confirming treatments, including hormone therapy, for a small group of inmates who requested it during Trump’s four years in office.)
One Trump campaign ad refers to a convicted murderer sentenced to life in prison in California. “Kamala Harris pushed to use tax dollars to pay for his sex change,” says the ad, which ran 17,375 times in the last three weeks of October at a cost of more than $10 million. The voice-over concludes, “Kamala’s agenda is they/them, not you.”
A second Trump campaign ad uses similar “they/them” language to hit the vice president on supporting “transgender sex changes in jail” and “letting biological men compete against our girls in their sport.”
The ad, with 13,445 airings in the last two weeks of October, appears to be aimed at Black men, as it uses a clip of the popular radio and podcast host Charlamagne Tha God raising the issue on his show.
Patriotism, in the very last days
The final, sweeping advertisements from both campaigns won’t show up in the largest buys or biggest runs because they will air for only a few days, but they have two traits in common: an appeal to patriotism and a conscious decision not to name the opposing candidate.
Harris’ two-minute-long finale, which was set to air during NFL games on Sunday, leans heavily on her own voice, ending with her speech on the Ellipse. It opens with a personal touch — her own — as she speaks with individual voters and their children, and then she addresses the camera about a new generation of leadership and a baton passed.
From her speeches, she is heard saying, “We see in our fellow Americans neighbors, not enemies,” as a tableau of the nation streams by, urban, rural, Black and white. The message mixes a lofty appeal for unity and a promise to address kitchen-table issues of grocery prices and prescription drugs.
Trump’s one-minute spot starts with a male voice — not his own. “Four years ago, we took a wrong turn, and lost our purpose,” the narrator says. As it paints a picture of a diminished America under the Biden-Harris administration, it suggests that anyone who “dared to speak the truth” has been accused of “hate speech.”
The visuals — migrants, criminals on the attack and the Algerian Olympic female boxer whom Trump has falsely called a man — are both menacing and familiar to Trump’s ads. (“Men can beat up women and win medals,” the narrator asserts, in an echo of the attack lines Trump and his party have used around the issue of transgender athletes.) But the ad segues to a defiant form of optimism, using the imagery of the assassination attempt on Trump to embody the pending American comeback.
“When we get knocked down, we don’t stay down: We get up again,” the narrator exhorts, using Trump’s own words from that July day in Butler, Pennsylvania. “We fight, we fight, we fight.”