How the US election plays out in swing states

If you live outside a swing state, you can — if you really try — almost forget that there’s a chaotic US election going on. If you live inside one, not so much.

Lawn sign. Billboard. Text messages. Lots of text messages. in seven battlefield states will decide the US election, political advertising is everywhere, all the time. The race for the White House is inevitable

Is one of the tightest places presidential election entering their final days in living memory, Kamala Harris and Donald Trump are crisscrossing the country to make their final pitch to voters in swing states.

Their campaigns are there 24/7. While some people elsewhere in the United States can escape the madness, voters in Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin are being inundated with a number of messages and ads that have most targeted and sophisticated in political history.

And some of it is completely blunt.

There were vintage campaign banners plastered on lawns, windows and crowded sidewalks along the roads, as well as television ads filling the airwaves.

Adding to the campaign’s arsenal are digital ads, especially on social media, and a steady stream of personalized text messages soliciting donations and urging people to vote on the day. November 5 or before.

The 2024 election is on track to be the most expensive ever, with most of the funding going to advertising.

The Harris campaign and its affiliates have pumped more than $1.1 billion into advertising, nearly double the $602 million that the Trump campaign and its affiliates have spent. spent, according to the report. FT’s Ad Tracker.

The swing states that will decide the vote received $1.36 billion in total spending by the two campaigns. The largest share – $373.5 million – belongs to Pennsylvania, considered the most important battleground state.

“I think people are ready for it to be over,” said Tracee Malik, a real estate agent in the Pittsburgh area. “Almost the only ads we have these days are political ads.”

Harris’s most-broadcast TV shows have focused on her prosecutorial and middle-class background, her defense of reproductive rights and her claim that Trump only cares about the wealthy. Others focused on her opponent as “too unstable to lead.”

Trump’s most-aired ads are all about the economy, blaming Harris and President Joe Biden’s economic agenda for the high cost of living. But his best point was attacking the vice president for supporting gender affirmation in prison care, telling voters: “Kamala’s agenda is they/them, not you ”.

In Pennsylvania, Arizona and Nevada, Trump’s ads also criticized Harris on immigration, while in Georgia and North Carolina, pro-Harris ads focused on abortion rights.

Does the dam work? It’s not clear.

“I hate that ad,” said Vallon Laurence, a retired member of the U.S. Navy who lives in Atlanta, Georgia. “If you follow the advertising. . . You don’t want one of them.”

Local issues also feature in campaigns. Ads supporting Harris in North Carolina link Trump to Mark Robinson, the Republican gubernatorial candidate who once caught up in a scandal over allegations – which he vehemently denies – that he posted racist comments on a porn website.

At the same time, pro-Trump groups are sending messages attacking Harris and the Biden administration for their slow recovery efforts from Hurricane Helene. devastated western part of the state.

On social media, campaigns can target small groups of voters, tailoring content based on age, gender or even interests using memes, news or email sequence formats.

Harris’s campaign spent more than $10 million promoting generic-looking Facebook pages with headlines like “The Daily Scroll,” promoting favorable articles.

Democrats have also leveraged digital targeting tools to address women’s issues, especially on abortion rights, blaming Trump for the Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe vs. Wade.

More than a quarter of the Harris campaign’s Facebook and Instagram ads were viewed by at least two-thirds of the audience who were women. Almost no one has similar gains for men.

Pro-Harris super Pacs — political action committees or fundraising and spending groups that are not allowed to coordinate with campaigns — target women even more aggressively: 51% of ads Their meta reaches a predominantly female audience, compared to just 2% of a comparable male audience.

But discomfort with the propaganda wave has spread, even into voting races. ONE fierce battle Winning a US Senate seat from Montana – which could determine which party controls the upper chamber of Congress – has left locals exhausted.

According to analysis by the Financial Times, the state has had the highest advertising spend per voter in recent weeks, surpassing the battlegrounds.

“It just hits you right in the face,” said Emma Fry, 21, a student in Bozeman who recently came home to find a pile of political flyers and letters on her porch.

“They are absolutely everywhere. And at some point everyone will feel uncomfortable,” she said. “We have to pray for the day it all ends, because we need to resolve this.”

Additional reporting by Myles McCormick in Atlanta and Bozeman, Montana and Oliver Roeder in New York; Video editing by Jamie Han