President Joe Biden isn’t wasting any time using former President Donald Trump’s felony conviction to his advantage — and he’s spending big bucks to do it.
The Biden campaign on Monday announced that it’s shelling out $50 million for an advertising blitz against Trump, including a television ad that will begin running in the battleground states.
And that allocated money is just for the remainder of June alone — which encompasses a critical stretch ahead of the first presidential debate between the two major-party candidates on June 27.
The 30-second “Character Matters” television ad zeroes in on Trump’s legal troubles: the 34 felony convictions from the former president’s Manhattan hush-money case, him being found liable for sexual assault, and a New York judge ruling that he committed financial fraud.
In contrast, the ad says, Biden has been at work “lowering healthcare costs and making big corporations pay their fair share.”
“This election is between a convicted criminal who’s only out for himself, and a president who’s fighting for your family,” the ad said.
“Trump approaches the first debate as a convicted felon who continues to prove that he will do anything and harm anyone if it means more power and vengeance for Donald Trump,” the campaign’s communications director, Michael Tyler, said in a statement to Business Insider.
“That’s why he was convicted, that’s why he encouraged a violent mob to storm the Capitol on January 6, and it’s why his entire campaign is an exercise in revenge and retribution; because that man is blind to the people a president should be serving and will do absolutely anything for his own personal gain and for his own power,” Tyler continued.
Trump and his campaign have painted his legal woes as political persecution, alleging without evidence that Biden himself has orchestrated a conspiracy against his rival to influence the upcoming election.
The former president’s legal losses have so far all occurred in state-run courts.
The Biden campaign’s media blitz also includes a seven-figure investment targeting Black, Latino, and Asian American voters.
The targeted blitz includes separate ads highlighting the importance of the Affordable Care Act on Asian American, Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islander voters, emphasizing Biden’s fight against corporate greed to Spanish speakers, and underscoring the positive impact Biden has had on Black communities, the campaign said in its statement.
Biden has been lagging with minority voters in recent polling, and his campaign is working to reverse numbers showing Trump with a narrow but durable lead nationally and in several key swing states.
Recent polling has also shown Biden and Trump in a virtual tie in Virginia, a Democratic-leaning state where the president won by double digits in 2020. Despite Biden’s softer numbers in the state, many political observers believe Virginia voters will once again back him in the fall.
Meanwhile, Biden’s approval rating has fallen to record lows as many progressive voters hammer him over his handling of the Israel-Hamas war. And Biden continues to struggle in the eyes of voters over the economy, despite strong jobs numbers and an unemployment rate that has sat at 4% or below since January 2022.
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