Inside the Biggest 2020 Advertising War Against Trump

Michael Bloomberg’s presidential campaign wants to flood voters with attacks on Mr. Trump before it is too late, a lesson Republican candidates learned in 2016 when they initially ignored him.

NY TIMES

By Jeremy W. Peters

• Dec. 29, 2019

WASHINGTON — Hillary Clinton tried. So did 16 rival Republicans. And after hundreds of millions of dollars were spent on ads attacking Donald Trump in 2016, the results were the same: They never did much damage.

Now Michael R. Bloomberg is trying — his way — spending millions each week in an online advertising onslaught that is guided by polling and data that he and his advisers believe provide unique insight into the president’s vulnerabilities.

The effort, which is targeting seven battleground states where polls show Mr. Trump is likely to be competitive in November, is just one piece of an advertising campaign that is unrivaled in scope and scale. On Facebook and Google alone, where Mr. Bloomberg is most focused on attacking the president, he has spent $18 million on ads over the last month, according to Acronym, a digital messaging firm that works with Democrats.

That is on top of the $128 million the Bloomberg campaign has spent on television ads, according to Advertising Analytics, an independent firm, which projects that Mr. Bloomberg is likely to spend a combined $300 million to $400 million on advertising across all media before the Super Tuesday primaries in early March.

Those amounts dwarf the ad budgets of his rivals, and he is spending at a faster clip than past presidential campaigns as well. Mr. Bloomberg is also already spending more than the Trump campaign each week to reach voters online. And if the $400 million estimate holds, that would be about the same as what President Barack Obama’s campaign spent on advertising over the course of the entire general election in 2012.

Video

0:00/3:02

TRANSCRIPT

Who Is Michael Bloomberg? | 2020 Presidential Candidate

The billionaire businessman and former mayor of New York is hoping he can forge a path to the Democratic nomination by positioning himself as a centrist who can take on President Trump.

A billionaire businessman, philanthropist and former mayor of New York City. “Oh, you’re welcome.” Michael Bloomberg is making a late entry … “This is the road that I’m taking.” … into the Democratic presidential race. So who is he? Bloomberg grew up outside of Boston. After college and Harvard Business School, he got into investment banking. In the 1980s, he created the Bloomberg Terminal, a financial tool for investors that would make him a billionaire. And in 2001, Bloomberg ran for mayor of New York City as a Republican. “That should make a great politician.” Then in the middle of his campaign, New York City changed forever on Sept. 11. As New York’s outgoing mayor took the national stage, he gave Bloomberg the thumbs up. “Well, I’m urging people to vote for Mike Bloomberg.” “I, Michael R. Bloomberg —” Bloomberg won. One of his priorities as mayor was tackling public health. “Sixty-four ounce. Just think about that.” “Don’t go near these things.” He also pushed for controversial stop-and-frisk policies that disproportionately affected minority communities. “Everything the New York City Police Department has done is absolutely —is legal.” But just days before entering the presidential race this year, he apologized. “I just want you to know that I realize back then, I was wrong.” In 2007, he left the G.O.P. And in 2008, during the financial crisis, he asked the City Council to extend term limits in order to let him run for a controversial third term. “Yes.” “No.” “No.” “Aye.” “Aye.” The vote passed, and he won re-election. “We’re going to make the next four years the best yet.” So what about the issues? After he left office in 2013, Bloomberg went back to running his company, which includes a news division. But he’s also focused on supporting candidates … “Let’s elect a sane, competent person.” … and causes he cares about, many of which are now key parts of his platform. Bloomberg is a vocal supporter of gun reform. “We cannot have a society where you go out in the street, and you can get blown away. We just have to say enough is enough.” He also has big plans for health care reform and fighting climate change. “Trump has done us a favor. Every time he riles against climate change, the money comes flooding in.” Overall, Bloomberg is positioning himself as a moderate in the Democratic field. “With the right candidate, we can turn areas from red to blue.” So what about his chances? They’re somewhat unknown. As a billionaire and fellow New Yorker, Bloomberg supporters feel he is uniquely positioned to take on President Trump. “I’m a New Yorker, and I know a con when I see one.” “There is nobody I’d rather run against than ‘Little Michael.’ That I can tell you.” But he has challenges ahead. He’s as not well known outside of New York City. Also, Bloomberg probably won’t participate in any of the Democratic debates, and he’s likely to skip the early primaries and caucuses. His hope: to surge on Super Tuesday and chart a path to the nomination. “I am running for president to defeat Donald Trump, and to unite and rebuild America.”

00:00

3:02

3:02Who Is Michael Bloomberg? | 2020 Presidential Candidate

The billionaire businessman and former mayor of New York is hoping he can forge a path to the Democratic nomination by positioning himself as a centrist who can take on President Trump.CreditCredit...Chet Strange for The New York Times

The ads amount to a huge bet by the Bloomberg campaign that there are enough Americans who are not too fixed in their opinions of Mr. Trump and can be swayed by the ads’ indictment of his conduct and character.

None of these assumptions are safe in a political environment that is increasingly bifurcated along partisan lines and where, for many voters, information from “the other side” is instantly suspect. But Mr. Bloomberg’s aides believe it is imperative to flood voters with attacks on the president before it is too late — a lesson Republicans learned in 2016 when they initially spent most of their ad budgets during the primaries tearing into each other while ignoring Mr. Trump.

“All this effort and all this money and none of it goes to help the one election that really matters?” asks a man from Michigan in one new Bloomberg campaign ad, referring to the spending in the Democratic primary. The campaign plans to run the ad online in Super Tuesday primary states.

Another man featured in the ad bemoans the fact that the Trump campaign is so focused on Pennsylvania but that none of the Democrats seem to be. “By the looks of it, he’s trying to win Pennsylvania once again. He’s here all the time,” the man says.

In swing states like Wisconsin and Pennsylvania that are likely to decide whether Mr. Trump gets re-elected, the president’s campaign and its allies have already been advertising on his behalf for more than a year. Mr. Bloomberg’s campaign is focusing its efforts there, hoping to erode Mr. Trump’s standing.

“I’ve been telling anyone who will listen, Trump is winning,” said Kevin Sheekey, the campaign manager for Mr. Bloomberg.

In interviews, Mr. Bloomberg’s top strategists described how they believe they can undermine Mr. Trump’s standing with voters who are open to reconsidering their support for him. According to the campaign’s data, this is somewhere between 10 percent to 15 percent of the people who voted for him in 2016.

STATE OF THE RACE

Which Democrats are leading the 2020 presidential race?

Mr. Bloomberg’s aides say their data generally shows that these people tend to express disappointment about promises Mr. Trump has failed to keep on issues like rebuilding the nation’s infrastructure — an especially potent concern in places like Michigan. In most states, they are upset with the president’s push to repeal the Affordable Care Act without putting forward a Republican alternative, which voters view as jeopardizing their health coverage. They view his response to several mass shootings during his term as lacking urgency and seriousness, particularly in the suburbs around Detroit and Philadelphia, the Bloomberg data shows.

And many of them report feelings of exasperation and exhaustion after three years of what seems like daily, head-spinning stories about Mr. Trump, his impulsivity, dysfunction inside his administration and partisan squabbling in Washington that has in some cases bled into their lives at home and work.

“With the percentage of the electorate that is open to reconsidering, there is a tax on them that they want to eliminate — and that tax is on their attention,” said Gary Briggs, who last year left Facebook as its chief marketing officer to join Mr. Bloomberg’s company and is now advising his presidential campaign.

The messages that the Bloomberg campaign is using in ads on social media and other websites are tailored to this sense of exhaustion. “Say no to chaos,” says one that appeared on Facebook in North Carolina.

“Another tweet. Another lie. Trump has tweeted thousands of false statements — causing chaos and embarrassing our country,” reads another, depicting a picture of a man covering his face in evident despair as he stands in what appears to be a soybean field. (Soybean farmers have been among the most affected by Mr. Trump’s tariffs on Chinese goods.)

Others are more issue-specific and play to a notion that Bloomberg strategists say has tested well in their research: The president is looking out for the interests of big corporations and the wealthy despite promises to improve the lives of working-class Americans.

The seven states the Bloomberg campaign has chosen are some of the most competitive, like Wisconsin and Florida, and others where Democrats believe they can chip away at Republican dominance, like Texas and Arizona. Rounding out the list are Michigan, Pennsylvania and North Carolina.

The Trump campaign has responded aggressively to Mr. Bloomberg’s entry into the race, going so far as to bar reporters from Bloomberg News from its rallies and events because the outlet has said it would not conduct investigative reporting on Mr. Bloomberg’s rivals for the Democratic nomination. Mr. Trump has belittled the former mayor and dismissed him as a threat saying, “Little Michael will fail.”

Finding the most incisive way to attack a sitting president is extremely difficult for a variety of reasons. Not only does the president enjoy the power and platform of incumbency, but by and large Americans have already formed their views over the course of the first term.

Larry McCarthy, a Republican ad maker who wrote many of the super PAC ads that attempted to undercut President Barack Obama’s popularity with swing voters in 2012, said he believes his ads were not as effective “because many voters had already made a judgment about Obama.”

That judgment, he said, was that “a significant number of voters, in our data, did not like Obama policies but did not think he was a bad guy.”

Image

A crowd at a Trump rally in Battle Creek, Mich., the night of the House impeachment vote.Credit...Pete Marovich for The New York Times

With Mr. Trump, the opposite is true. Polls show that, for instance, most Americans approve of his handling of the economy. But they consistently give him low job approval ratings, saying that they do not think he is honest.

And public polls further show he stands an even chance of winning many battleground states against a variety of the Democratic candidates, which the Bloomberg campaign said tracks with its internal data.

With the ads, the Bloomberg campaign is also walking a fine line between trying to undercut Mr. Trump and turning off voters who may not like the president but do not want to dwell on him.

“There is a kind of anxiety that he creates,” said Howard Wolfson, one of Mr. Bloomberg’s longtime top advisers, about Mr. Trump. “This is real for people,” he added, acknowledging the contradictory factors. “There’s a bit of ‘Leave us alone.’”

The campaign said that it had produced 160 versions of its ads on social media alone, reaching 15.5 million people in the first two weeks of December.

“Michael Bloomberg’s fledgling campaign has now spent more on Google and YouTube in the past month than the Trump campaign has spent all year,” Acronym said in a recent analysis of the race.

The ability to pour that much money into ads not only enables Mr. Bloomberg’s campaign to pump out millions of messages a week, it also allows for more precise targeting to individual groups of uncommitted voters — whether that’s women in the suburbs concerned about gun violence or more fiscally conservative people who are alarmed at the nation’s rapidly expanding deficit.

One of the most potentially significant impacts of the Bloomberg strategy, said Ken Goldstein, a professor of politics at the University of San Francisco and an expert in political advertising, could be how he is filling the void in places where pro-Trump ads are dominant.

In a new study Mr. Goldstein conducted with a group of other academics who specialize in political messaging, he said they found that in 2016 the lack of advertising from Mrs. Clinton’s campaign seemed to contribute to lower turnout among voters favorable to her. Democrats with a lower propensity of voting in Michigan and Wisconsin, the study found, were less likely to turn out in areas where Mr. Trump was investing heavily online but where Mrs. Clinton was not advertising.

“The overall impact was modest, to be sure,” Mr. Goldstein said. “But Trump’s margin of victory in Michigan and Wisconsin was also extremely modest.”

In addition to the hard-hitting critiques of Mr. Trump and his leadership, Mr. Bloomberg’s ads are also designed to send a positive message about the former mayor that reaches Democrats in the primary. And it is those voters, no doubt, who need to be convinced first in order for Mr. Bloomberg to politically benefit from his huge investment in anti-Trump advertising.

“Sometimes it’s easiest to define yourself by what you are not,” said Todd Harris, a Republican messaging strategist who has worked on several presidential campaigns, most recently for Senator Marco Rubio of Florida. These ads, he said, are “all about Mike Bloomberg introducing himself to primary voters as someone who dislikes Trump as much as they do.”

How Italians Became ‘White’

BRENT STAPLES, NY TIMES

Congress envisioned a white, Protestant and culturally homogeneous America when it declared in 1790 that only “free white persons, who have, or shall migrate into the United States” were eligible to become naturalized citizens. The calculus of racism underwent swift revision when waves of culturally diverse immigrants from the far corners of Europe changed the face of the country.

As the historian Matthew Frye Jacobson shows in his immigrant history “Whiteness of a Different Color,” the surge of newcomers engendered a national panic and led Americans to adopt a more restrictive, politicized view of how whiteness was to be allocated. Journalists, politicians, social scientists and immigration officials embraced the habit, separating ostensibly white Europeans into “races.” Some were designated “whiter” — and more worthy of citizenship — than others, while some were ranked as too close to blackness to be socially redeemable. The story of how Italian immigrants went from racialized pariah status in the 19th century to white Americans in good standing in the 20th offers a window onto the alchemy through which race is constructed in the United States, and how racial hierarchies can sometimes change.

Darker skinned southern Italians endured the penalties of blackness on both sides of the Atlantic. In Italy, Northerners had long held that Southerners — particularly Sicilians — were an “uncivilized” and racially inferior people, too obviously African to be part of Europe.

Racist dogma about Southern Italians found fertile soil in the United States. As the historian Jennifer Guglielmo writes, the newcomers encountered waves of books, magazines and newspapers that “bombarded Americans with images of Italians as racially suspect.” They were sometimes shut out of schools, movie houses and labor unions, or consigned to church pews set aside for black people. They were described in the press as “swarthy,” “kinky haired” members of a criminal race and derided in the streets with epithets like “dago,” “guinea” — a term of derision applied to enslaved Africans and their descendants — and more familiarly racist insults like “white nigger” and “nigger wop.”

Italian-Americans were often used as cheap labor on
the docks of New Orleans at the turn of the last century.Library of Congress

Mulberry Street in the Little Italy
section of New York around 1900.Library of Congress

The penalties of blackness went well beyond name-calling in the apartheid South. Italians who had come to the country as “free white persons” were often marked as black because they accepted “black” jobs in the Louisiana sugar fields or because they chose to live among African-Americans. This left them vulnerable to marauding mobs like the ones that hanged, shot, dismembered or burned alive thousands of black men, women and children across the South.

The federal holiday honoring the Italian explorer Christopher Columbus — celebrated on Monday — was central to the process through which Italian-Americans were fully ratified as white during the 20th century. The rationale for the holiday was steeped in myth, and allowed Italian-Americans to write a laudatory portrait of themselves into the civic record.

Few who march in Columbus Day parades or recount the tale of Columbus’s voyage from Europe to the New World are aware of how the holiday came about or that President Benjamin Harrison proclaimed it as a one-time national celebration in 1892 — in the wake of a bloody New Orleans lynching that took the lives of 11 Italian immigrants. The proclamation was part of a broader attempt to quiet outrage among Italian-Americans, and a diplomatic blowup over the murders that brought Italy and the United States to the brink of war.

Historians have recently showed that America’s dishonorable response to this barbaric event was partly conditioned by racist stereotypes about Italians promulgated in Northern newspapers like The Times. A striking analysis by Charles Seguin, a sociologist at Pennsylvania State University, and Sabrina Nardin, a doctoral student at the University of Arizona, shows that the protests lodged by the Italian government inspired something that had failed to coalesce around the brave African-American newspaper editor and anti-lynching campaigner Ida B. Wells — a broad anti-lynching effort.

A Black ‘Brute’ Lynched

The lynchings of Italians came at a time when newspapers in the South had established the gory convention of advertising the far more numerous public murders of African-Americans in advance — to attract large crowds — and justifying the killings by labeling the victims “brutes,” “fiends,” “ravishers,” “born criminals” or “troublesome Negroes.” Even high-minded news organizations that claimed to abhor the practice legitimized lynching by trafficking in racist stereotypes about its victims.

As Mr. Seguin recently showed, many Northern newspapers were “just as complicit” in justifying mob violence as their Southern counterparts. For its part, The Times made repeated use of the headline “A Brutal Negro Lynched,” presuming the victims’ guilt and branding them as congenital criminals. Lynchings of black men in the South were often based on fabricated accusations of sexual assault. As the Equal Justice Initiative explained in its 2015 report on lynching in America, a rape charge could occur in the absence of an actual victim and might arise from minor violations of the social code — like complimenting a white woman on her appearance or even bumping into her on the street.

The Times was not owned by the family that controls it today when it dismissed Ida B. Wells as a “slanderous and nasty-minded mulattress” for rightly describing rape allegations as “a thread bare lie” that Southerners used against black men who had consensual sexual relationships with white women. Nevertheless, as a Times editorialist of nearly 30 years standing — and a student of the institution’s history — I am outraged and appalled by the nakedly racist treatment my 19th-century predecessors displayed in writing about African-Americans and Italian immigrants.

When Wells took her anti-lynching campaign to England in the 1890s, Times editors rebuked her for representing “black brutes” abroad in an editorial that joked about what they described as “the practice of roasting Negro ravishers alive and boring out their eyes with red-hot pokers.” The editorial slandered African-Americans generally, referring to rape as “a crime to which Negroes are particularly prone.” The Times editors may have lodged objections to lynching — but they did so in a rhetoric firmly rooted in white supremacy.

‘Assassins by Nature’

Italian immigrants were welcomed into Louisiana after the Civil War, when the planter class was in desperate need of cheap labor to replace newly emancipated black people, who were leaving backbreaking jobs in the fields for more gainful employment.

These Italians seemed at first to be the answer to both the labor shortage and the increasingly pressing quest for settlers who would support white domination in the emerging Jim Crow state. Louisiana’s romance with Italian labor began to sour when the new immigrants balked at low wages and dismal working conditions.

The newcomers also chose to live together in Italian neighborhoods, where they spoke their native tongue, preserved Italian customs and developed successful businesses that catered to African-Americans, with whom they fraternized and intermarried. In time, this proximity to blackness would lead white Southerners to view Sicilians, in particular, as not fully white and to see them as eligible for persecution — including lynching — that had customarily been imposed on African-Americans.

Clams being sold from a cart in Little Italy.Library of Congress

Many Italian-Americans lived in a section of New
Orleans that became known as Little Palermo.Library of Congress

Nevertheless, as the historian Jessica Barbata Jackson showed recently in the journal Louisiana History, Italian newcomers were still well thought of in New Orleans in the 1870s when negative stereotypes were being established in the Northern press.

The Times, for instance, described them as bandits and members of the criminal classes who were “wretchedly poor and unskilled,” “starving and wholly destitute.” The stereotype about inborn criminality is plainly evident in an 1874 story about Italian immigrants seeking vaccinations that refers to one immigrant as a “burly fellow, whose appearance was like that of the traditional brigand of the Abruzzi.”

A Times story in 1880 described immigrants, including Italians, as “links in a descending chain of evolution.” These characterizations reached a defamatory crescendo in an 1882 editorial that appeared under the headline “Our Future Citizens.” The editors wrote:

“There has never been since New York was founded so low and ignorant a class among the immigrants who poured in here as the Southern Italians who have been crowding our docks during the past year.”

The editors reserved their worst invective for Italian immigrant children, whom they described as “utterly unfit — ragged, filthy, and verminous as they were — to be placed in the public primary schools among the decent children of American mechanics.”

The racist myth that African-Americans and Sicilians were both innately criminal drove an 1887 Times story about a lynching victim in Mississippi whose name was given as “Dago Joe” — “dago” being a slur directed at Italian and Spanish-speaking immigrants. The victim was described as a “half breed” who “was the son of a Sicilian father and a mulatto mother, and had the worst characteristics of both races in his makeup. He was cunning, treacherous and cruel, and was regarded in the community where he lived as an assassin by nature.”

Sicilians as ‘Rattlesnakes’

The carnage in New Orleans was set in motion in the fall of 1890, when the city’s popular police chief, David Hennessy, was assassinated on his way home one evening. Hennessy had no shortage of enemies. The historian John V. Baiamonte Jr. writes that he had once been tried for murder in connection with the killing of a professional rival. He is also said to have been involved in a feud between two Italian businessmen. On the strength of a clearly suspect witness who claimed to hear Mr. Hennessy say that “dagoes” had shot him, the city charged 19 Italians with complicity in the chief’s murder.

The monument to David Hennessy rises above nearly all
the other tombs in Metairie Cemetery in New Orleans.William Widmer for The New York Times

That the evidence was distressingly weak was evident from the verdicts that were swiftly handed down: Of the first nine to be tried, six were acquitted; three others were granted mistrials. The leaders of the mob that then went after them advertised their plans in advance, knowing full well that the city’s elites — who coveted the businesses the Italians had built or hated the Italians for fraternizing with African-Americans — would never seek justice for the dead. After the lynching, a grand jury investigation pronounced the killings praiseworthy, turning that inquiry into what the historian Barbara Botein describes as “possibly one of the greatest whitewashes in American history.”

The blood of the New Orleans victims was scarcely dry when The Times published a cheerleading news story — “Chief Hennessy Avenged: Eleven of his Italian Assassins Lynched by a Mob” — that reveled in the bloody details. It reported that the mob had consisted “mostly of the best element” of New Orleans society. The following day, a scabrous Times editorial justified the lynching — and dehumanized the dead, with by-now-familiar racist stereotypes.

“These sneaking and cowardly Sicilians,” the editors wrote, “the descendants of bandits and assassins, who have transported to this country the lawless passions, the cutthroat practices … are to us a pest without mitigations. Our own rattlesnakes are as good citizens as they. Our own murderers are men of feeling and nobility compared to them.” The editors concluded of the lynching that it would be difficult to find “one individual who would confess that privately he deplores it very much.”

Lynchers in 1891 storming the New Orleans city jail, where they killed 11 Italian-Americans accused in the fatal shooting of Chief Hennessy.Italian Tribune

President Harrison would have ignored the New Orleans carnage had the victims been black. But the Italian government made that impossible. It broke off diplomatic relations and demanded an indemnity that the Harrison administration paid. Harrison even called on Congress in his 1891 State of the Union to protect foreign nationals — though not black Americans — from mob violence.

Harrison’s Columbus Day proclamation in 1892 opened the door for Italian-Americans to write themselves into the American origin story, in a fashion that piled myth upon myth. As the historian Danielle Battisti shows in “Whom We Shall Welcome,” they rewrote history by casting Columbus as “the first immigrant” — even though he never set foot in North America and never immigrated anywhere (except possibly to Spain), and even though the United States did not exist as a nation during his 15th-century voyage. The mythologizing, carried out over many decades, granted Italian-Americans “a formative role in the nation-building narrative.” It also tied Italian-Americans closely to the paternalistic assertion, still heard today, that Columbus “discovered” a continent that was already inhabited by Native Americans.

The “Monument to the Immigrant,” commissioned by the Italian American Marching Club of New Orleans, stands along the Mississippi River in Woldenberg Park.William Widmer for The New York Times

But in the late 19th century, the full-blown Columbus myth was yet to come. The New Orleans lynching solidified a defamatory view of Italians generally, and Sicilians in particular, as irredeemable criminals who represented a danger to the nation. The influential anti-immigrant racist Representative Henry Cabot Lodge of Massachusetts, soon to join the United States Senate, quickly appropriated the event. He argued that a lack of confidence in juries, not mob violence, had been the real problem in New Orleans. “Lawlessness and lynching are evil things,” he wrote, “but a popular belief that juries cannot be trusted is even worse.”

Facts aside, Lodge argued, beliefs about immigrants were in themselves sufficient to warrant higher barriers to immigration. Congress ratified that notion during the 1920s, curtailing Italian immigration on racial grounds, even though Italians were legally white, with all of the rights whiteness entailed.

The Italian-Americans who labored in the campaign that overturned racist immigration restrictions in 1965 used the romantic fictions built up around Columbus to political advantage. This shows yet again how racial categories that people mistakenly view as matters of biology grow out of highly politicized myth making.