How Far Can Political Ads Go to Swing the Vote?
On a mid-October Sunday not long ago—sun high, wind cool—I was in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, for a book festival, and I took a stroll. There were few people on the streets—like the population of a lot of capital cities, Harrisburg’s swells on weekdays with lawyers and lobbyists and legislative staffers, and dwindles on the weekends. But, on the façades of small businesses and in the doorways of private homes, I could see evidence of political activity. Across from the sparkling Susquehanna River, there was a row of Democratic lawn signs: Malcolm Kenyatta for auditor general, Bob Casey for U.S. Senate, and, most important, in white letters atop a periwinkle not unlike that of the sky, Kamala Harris for President. Loose pamphlets were scattered over the ground. Behind a screen door on a side street, I saw a Sharpied message scribbled with evident irritation: “NO Political Flier.”
I was looking for a sports bar, both to watch the Eagles play the Browns—when in Rome—and to look out for any ads that might be running with the swing-state crowd in mind. The current political season, dense with incident and overcast with grim premonitions, feels more difficult than usual to take in at just a glance. Too much is happening. No ad-maker in the world could be expected to keep up with the waterfall of events: assassination attempts, abrupt abrogations, morbid rallies with ominous lighting foreshadowing a future in which the nation is one big L.E.D.-lit Death Star. And the rapid fracturing of what we’re still straining to call mass media makes it so that you can’t really be sure whether what you’re seeing on TV is the story your fellow-citizens are also following.
Sometimes, when I take a YouTube tour through the small rotation of rambling, male-centric podcasts hosted by bombastic former rappers that keep me up to date on the doings in contemporary hip-hop, I’ll get a Harris ad that seems targeted to people like me: Black men who want her to win and who feel disillusioned by the news. Harris, in the ad, looks wan and stern, even slightly annoyed—possibly it was the last bit of work in a long day. “Don’t forget that little thing for the Black manosphere,” some staffer might have said, prompting a weary sigh from the Vice-President. “Polls show us this is the closest Presidential campaign in sixty years,” she tells viewers. “We might be the underdogs in this race, but I believe in you, I believe in our team, and let’s get to work.” The title of the video is gently catastrophist: “We Are Falling Behind.” I doubt that the suburban moms of Philadelphia, Atlanta, Milwaukee, Raleigh, and Tucson—those mega-voters whose votes matter so much more than mine, in New York City—get bureaucratic business, both panicked and encouraging, like this. Maybe watching TV in a more consequential state, I thought, would help me understand a bit better.
I found the right bar—the crowd didn’t conform to any type that I could discern. The bartenders had tattoos down to their wrists and up to their necks; one woman wore glasses and a black-and-white kaffiyeh, telegraphing her support for Palestinians in Gaza under siege; a guy had a gray hoodie on beneath an Eagles jersey. When the Browns blocked an Eagles field goal, got the ball, and ran it back for a touchdown, the hoodie guy had an angry fit. “That is the most Philadelphia shit I’ve ever seen,” he shouted as he settled his tab.
If an ad for either candidate ran, nobody noticed it.
In New York, we get bombarded with barbs by local pols. Mike Lawler, the Republican congressman who represents Rockland and Putnam counties, wants you to know that Mondaire Jones, his Democratic challenger, has been endorsed by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. One of his ads portrays Jones as a radical, his color washed out, with the words “Defunding Police” beneath his face. Gotcha. Lawler never mentions Donald Trump, and his choice of issue, public safety, makes the ad almost quaint, like it could have been plucked from the pre-Trump era—say, 2012, when the paint-by-numbers Republican Mitt Romney was at the top of the ticket.
There’s an increasingly loony, dark, semi-fascist faction within the Republican House, to be sure—you might even call it the ruling faction. Famous names like Marjorie Taylor Greene, Lauren Boebert, and Matt Gaetz get so much press and screen time that they appear to have successfully taken over their party. But guys like Lawler, stranded in blue states, seem to be sticking their fingers into their ears and hoping for the chaos to pass over like a long storm. (Without a rare and sustained display of conscience from them, it won’t.)
Sometimes I detect a hint of a similar sort of poll-tested nostalgia in Harris’s commercials, or, more precisely, a struggle between acknowledging Trump’s world-historic strangeness and sticking to the issues that feel native to a Presidential campaign. One ad starts out showing kids on their bikes and elders at a kitchen table—then there’s a menacing angle on some imposing buildings down on Wall Street. It’s a swift, reproachful reading of Project 2025, the much ballyhooed blueprint for a second Trump term. The warnings, in bold letters, pour forward with total clarity. Trump means “HIGHER COSTS ON GROCERIES” and “CUTS TO SOCIAL SECURITY AND MEDICARE” and “TAX BREAKS FOR BILLIONAIRES” and a “NATIONAL ABORTION BAN.” That stuff is scary and, by my lights, probably true, but it also represents a fairly standard line of attack by a Democrat against any Republican candidate of the past quarter century. And, yes: part of Trump’s danger is how, even amid his exotic behaviors and promises of novelty, he can quite easily conform to the broken, often fatal status quo that preceded his Presidency. But then the commercial ends with a litany of exceptional adjectives describing Trump in all his uniqueness, only notionally connected to the issues, in a foreboding stack: “UNHINGED / UNSTABLE / UNCHECKED.”
Which: true. But the ad, just like the candidate behind it, is trying to do so much work—to speak to frazzled parents and to worried seniors and, crucially, to women eager to preserve sovereignty over their bodies and lives. But you’ve also got to talk about the crazy, right? The crazy’s too important to bracket off in its own commercial, I guess. The impression the ad leaves, though, is of a campaign overstretched by the miasmic spread of its opponent’s toxicity.
The bureaucratic and technical competency of Harris’s campaign is one of the stronger cases for her candidacy. Her team excels at raising money, making more or less slick ads like the “UNHINGED” one, setting up energetic-looking rallies with optimally diverse cross-sections from the crowd placed just behind the podium. At the biggest moment of her public career, Harris is evidently able to run a smooth operation, largely devoid of internal drama. But in her rhetoric, both personal and commercial, she reminds me of a decent free safety on an otherwise bad defensive unit, zagging back and forth, overcome by potential disasters to tamp down. She’s not alone in this: no Democrat since 2015—no primary-tortured Republican, either—has landed on a single, all-encompassing anti-Trump message to hit and hammer home.
Trump, on the other hand, seems to be communicating in a language that only his biggest fans can decipher completely. Implicitly, his crowd cries out like the speaker of Robert Frost’s poem “Choose Something Like a Star”: “Talk Fahrenheit, talk Centigrade. / Use language we can comprehend.” Trump never fails to answer in the affirmative, even if it means that nobody else can pick up the signal. If Harris is still opening her arms, in search of new constituencies to persuade, Trump is drilling his way down a narrow path, apparently content to stick with his true pals and keep playing the hits.
If he ends up casting a wide net—chipping away at some groups of Black and Latino men—it’s because more kinds of Americans are willfully imagining themselves into comradeship with him, not the other way around. Trump does Trump and dares you to join in. Surely this confidence in the loyalty of his audience is why, just the other day, in Latrobe, Pennsylvania, he felt comfortable enough to go on for more than ten minutes about its home-town golf god, Arnold Palmer, punctuating the hagiographic reminiscence—itself an advertisement for the days of the “good old boy”—with a wisecrack about the size of Palmer’s, well, club?
“This is a guy that was all man,” Trump said, playing to his primarily male voter base, near and far. “I refuse to say it”—no, he didn’t—“but, when he took showers with the other pros, they came out of there, they said, ‘Oh, my God, that’s unbelievable.’ ” Then he laughed at his own joke sincerely, the way you do when you’re surrounded by friends.
The same insider logic is at work in Trump’s campaign ads. During the World Series, a bizarre commercial ran. It starts off with DJ Envy and Charlamagne tha God—the co-hosts of the radio show “The Breakfast Club” and notable Harris supporters—quizzically reading about her policy to support “taxpayer-funded sex changes for prisoners.”
“Hell no, I don’t want my taxpayer dollars going to that!” Charlamagne shouts.
Soon, a narrator out of a movie trailer begins in a rumbling voice meant to convey peril and light humor all at once: “Kamala is for they/them. President Trump is for you.” The ad ends with a total non sequitur: Trump hugging an elderly Black woman. The U.S. Capitol sits behind them. Guys who look like law-enforcement officers stand nearby. The woman’s eyes are squeezed shut, and her hand grasps at Trump’s elbow. Her face is placid and grateful, set in ecstasy or prayer. Presumably, she’s happy, too happy for feeble words, that Donald Trump shares her unprompted dislike for trans people, but the ad doesn’t make that clear. She’s a hugger and her President is, too—that’s all. (“The Breakfast Club” ’s producers have issued a cease-and-desist order to Trump’s campaign.) And so there you are, taking in the ballgame with your kids, hoping to transmit to them the beauties of America’s pastime but also impatiently waiting to hear some vile slurry, apropos of nothing, about transitioning behind bars. The ad refuses—just as Trump himself refuses—to leave its watchers lukewarm.
One source of Trump’s instinctive, inimitable political talent is that, for him, oratory and advertisement are entirely coeval domains. If he’s talking, he’s selling. He never commits to one activity and forgets about the other. His recent three-hour conversation with the podcaster and notional comedian Joe Rogan was a master class in this regard—it was more infomercial than interview. Even at this late date in the campaign, Trump was still busily branding. “The word ‘tariff,’ ” he said, beaming proudly, as if he’d coined it. “It’s more beautiful than ‘love.’ ” Blockheaded protectionism never sounded so sweet.
During his already infamous rally at Madison Square Garden, Trump, at times, surrendered himself to the quick-cut propulsion of televised ads. The rally was an extravaganza during which Hulk Hogan ripped his shirt off, Dr. Phil sold snake oil, and Tucker Carlson giggled all the way through a block of quasi-Nazi text—just a bunch of dudes displaying skills that they’ve honed down the years.
But I was most riveted and confused at the moments when Trump, after making some mendacious claim, would veer away from his speech and let a nativist video about immigration play. It seemed like a tacit acknowledgment of what so many of us feel: that this campaign is a watershed in our nation’s already magical-realist political history, that speech—elliptical and wild like Trump’s, or nervously surveilled like Harris’s—is often unequal to the emergencies of the moment, that some things must be seen, high up on the screen, to be believed. ♦
