Trump campaign spends whopping $1.7m in TV ads after Harris dominates polls and headlines

Donald Trump’s campaign spent more than $1.7m on TV ads after Kamala Harris dominated headlines as the presumptive Democratic nominee.

Trump’s campaign purchased the ads, which will air over the next two weeks, on Monday, The Washington Post reports. The ads are expected to run in the swing states of Arizona, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Nevada, Georgia and Michigan. The move comes after Harris dominated headlines and polls in the weeks after President Joe Biden dropped out of the 2024 race and endorsed her as the next Democratic candidate.

Harris’ campaign is also planning to purchase a swath of ads later this week, a source told the Post.

The first polls released after Biden left the race showed Harris has won over Democrats, and is neck and neck with Trump, The Independent reported last week. The average of four polls show Harris at 43.5 percent and Trump at 44.8 percent.

Meanwhile, a poll from the Wall Street Journal released Monday shows Harris trailing Trump within the margin of error. In comparison, Biden was trailing Trump by nearly double digits a month ago.

Harris is also ahead of Trump by 19 percentage points among Hispanic voters, a New York Times/Siena College poll revealed last week. The same poll revealed similar results to the Journal: Harris and Trump are tied, each at 42 percent among registered voters. Among likely voters, however, Harris is leading Trump by one percentage point.

Harris’ campaign to label vice presidential candidate JD Vance as “weird and creepy” also appears to be working, an ABC News poll revealed on Monday. The Ohio senator’s negative poll numbers are rising, the survey showed, jumping eight percentage points in the last week.

Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, a Democrat, called JD Vance “an incredibly bad choice” as Trump’s running mate and alluded to a deadline for the former president to pick a new candidate.

“Donald Trump, I know him, and he’s probably sitting and watching the TV, and every day it comes out Vance has done something more extreme, more weird, more erratic,” Schumer said Sunday on weekend news show, Face the Nation.

Schumer went on to argue that the ballot access deadline in Vance’s home state of Ohio, August 7, is fast approaching — though the Ohio secretary of state says it has been extended to September 1.

Meanwhile, Harris is tasked with finding her own running mate.

Several lawmakers are in the running, including Arizona Senator Mark Kelly and Minnesota Governor Tim Walz.

Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro, who hosted a recent campaign event for the vice president alongside Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer, is also a top contender.