Republican candidates in this year’s midterms have almost entirely removed Donald Trump from their campaign ads, according to new data, only weeks out from Election Day. Trump has repeatedly urged his supporters and party to draw on his popularity with the Republican coalition in the lead-up to November 3, telling candidates and voters to “pretend I’m on the ballot.” But the advertising analytics firm AdImpact has revealed that campaigns are making nearly no mention of the president in the final stretch of the contest. The president is now being referenced in only 1 percent of Republican ads in October so far, compared to 47 percent back in May.
In contrast, Democrat ads have “increasingly mentioned” Trump, who has appeared in 21 percent of their broadcast airings this month. This comes as polls continue to show Trump’s standing with voters at or near record low levels, and amid other signs that Republican candidates—particularly those locked in tight races—are attempting to put daylight between themselves and the president. The Republican political strategist and Lincoln Project co-founder Mike Madrid told Newsweek that GOP candidates “can’t drop the Trump anchor fast enough,” but that this might prove “too little, too late” when it comes to saving their congressional campaigns.
In response to a past query on Republicans “distancing” themselves from the president, a White House official told Newsweek that Trump “is still the unequivocal leader of the Republican Party” and said there is "absolutely no distance" between him and the party's candidates. Newsweek has contacted the White House for further comment outside of regular working hours. This year, AdImpact found that Republicans had aired around 715,000 ads mentioning Trump—peaking at over 50,000 in the first week of May before dropping to only a few thousand in the past few weeks.
Democrats have aired 637,000 over the same period, with these increasing in frequency as the midterms approach. According to analysis from the New York Times, based on AdImpact data, Republicans have spent $830 million on ads airing September 9 to October 17, but less than 1 percent of these have made mention of Trump. Democrats, by contrast, have spent $590 million on ads, 20 percent of which reference the president.
The paper notes that this “differs sharply from the primaries”—when GOP candidates spent $55 of every $100 on ads mentioning Trump—and that the recent drop-off is one of several signs that Republicans now see their association with the president as an electoral risk rather than an asset. An investigation by Newsweek in September found that several Republican candidates in toss-up races had removed images of and references to Trump from their websites over the previous few months. At the same time, candidates increasingly emphasized affordability and the cost of living—issues which now dominate lists of voter concerns.
A spokesman for the Republican National Committee (RNC) accused Newsweek of “a lame attempt to manufacture Republican collapse.” And Republicans themselves appear nervous about too close an association with Trump. In leaked audio reported on by the New York Times in late September, Ken Paxton, the Texas attorney general and candidate for Senate, can be heard expressing concerns about the president’s impact on his campaign. Paxton later said that Trump had done “a great job as president,” and that “just because they were able to clip a few things doesn’t mean that that’s actually what I meant.” Maine Senator Susan Collins noted that she was not Trump’s “favorite senator” during an early October debate, at which she also boasted of voting against the president a number of times and called herself “the most outspoken opponent of the tariffs with Canada.” And Collins was also one of several Republicans to break with Trump over his plans to import Russian diesel to ease domestic prices—one of a growing number of administration policies on which GOP candidates and lawmakers have been willing to speak out.
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