Ad Wars of 2016 Campaign Erupt in a Changing TV Arena

The ad wars of the 2016 election are at hand. “We’re getting down to the firing-squad part of the campaign,” said Larry McCarthy, the strategist making ads for Right to Rise, Jeb Bush’s super PAC. “It’s like the end of the Quentin Tarantino movie, where everyone is shooting everyone else.” It is also a huge bet that television advertisements will remain a crucial, even decisive, political battlefield when signs increasingly suggest otherwise. Candidates and their allies spent nearly $100 million on political advertising in 2014, including $72 million in Iowa and New Hampshire alone, Kantar Media/CMAG estimated. Much of that was spent by candidates promoting themselves, not attacking their rivals. Yet the biggest spenders reaped only scant improvement in the polls.

Now, with three and a half weeks until the Iowa caucuses, presidential campaigns that spent much of 2015 wooing donors and amassing large amounts of money are spending that money hand over fist, feverishly vying to buy time during every popular show from morning to late-night TV. From Jan 3 to Jan 7 alone, according to Kantar, candidates and their allies in both parties spent an estimated $5.9 million on television ads — roughly a third of what was spent in the 2012 Republican primary from the beginning of 2011 through the Iowa caucuses. And much more of it now is going toward attempts to take down their rivals.