Hillary Clinton’s campaign moved Wednesday to nearly double its spending on television ads in Arizona for the final week of the campaign as the Democratic nominee prepared to hold an evening rally in the reliably Republican state.
The buy comes as polls suggest that Republican Donald Trump has reversed a slide in Arizona and retaken a lead he had lost in mid-October. The RealClearPolitics average of recent polls shows him ahead of Clinton by three percentage points. Trump campaigned in Phoenix on Saturday.
Part of the Democratic strategy is to force Trump, with less cash on hand and a much smaller ground operation, to work for a state that has been seen as an easy Republican victory in recent presidential elections. Arizona has voted for Republican by large margins in each election since 2000, but Democrats hope that a large and growing Latino population can begin to change that in the long term. This year, they also hope to draw moderate Republican women turned off by Trump.
Clinton is making her first and probably only campaign appearance at a rally in Tempe. Michelle Obama campaigned for Clinton in Arizona last month.
Clinton’s campaign made the surprise announcement of a six-figure ad buy for Arizona in September. Since then the buy has been expanded at least twice. The latest expansion takes a planned buy of about $500,000 for the last week of the election to more than $1 million.
Clinton’s campaign said the Arizona purchase is on top of an expanded advertising buy in several states for the final days of the election. It includes six-figure buys in Colorado, Virginia, Michigan and New Mexico.
All the new spending takes advantage of Clinton’s fatter bank account. As of Oct. 19, Clinton has more than $62 million on hand to Trump’s $16 million.
“Our fundraising is super-charged right now, so the resources are there for us to add to our get-out-the-vote efforts in states like Michigan, Colorado, Virginia and New Mexico,” campaign spokesman Jesse Ferguson said.
The campaign has also added a television buy in Wisconsin.
The campaign said that over the past 72 hours, it has taken in a record $11.3 million in online donations – the most at any point since Clinton became the Democratic nominee in July. The spike coincides with news of a renewed FBI inquiry into Clinton’s emails and a strong Democratic push to brand the development as partisan and unfair. Online fundraising appeals have asked Clinton supporters to “have her back” at a difficult time.
(c) 2016, The Washington Post ยท Anne Gearan
