Trump campaign rolls out TV spots in early voting states after advertising pause

President Trump’s reelection campaign announced Monday that it is rolling out TV ads in key early voting states after pausing advertising for several days last week. 

The campaign launched two new ads that will run in North Carolina, Georgia, Florida and Arizona on local broadcast and cable outlets and on Spanish language channels. The launch will be accompanied by a national cable buy, the campaign said. 

“The countdown clock may show 91 days left in the race, but in reality the election starts a lot sooner than that,” Trump 2020 campaign manager Bill Stepien said in a statement. “In many states, more than half of voters will cast their votes well before Election Day and we have adjusted our strategy to reflect that. Joe Biden is continuing to spend millions of dollars a week in states that won’t come online for two months and we encourage him to keep at it.”

Both ads seek to tie Biden, Trump’s presumptive Democratic challenger in November, to the “radical” and “far left.” One ad, titled “Takeover,” uses images of Biden alongside prominent progressives including Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) and Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.). 

“The radical left has taken over Joe Biden and the Democratic Party, don’t let them take over America,” the narrator of the 30-second ad says.

The other, titled “Cards,” features a woman holding cards that read “Joe Biden worries me. He’s weak,” followed by a card stating “Biden embraced the policies of the far left.”

A spokesperson for the Biden campaign slammed the new Trump ads, saying they are repeating the “same recycled lies.” 

“The American people know Joe Biden. And after seven consecutive months of failed leadership during the worst public health crisis in generations, they know that our nation’s capacity to join the rest of the world in beating back COVID-19 has been crippled by one overriding burden: Donald Trump,” Biden spokesperson Andrew Bates said in a statement. “That’s why the Trump campaign is locked in a sad and pathetic cycle of bimonthly, shambolic message ‘resets’ — all of which are based on the same recycled lies that voters have seen through countless times before.”

A Trump campaign official told NBC News last week that digital advertising efforts were paused to review strategy and new spots would “more forcefully exposing Joe Biden as a puppet of the racial left-wing.” 

The Trump campaign’s new ad push comes as the president is trailing Biden in polls of the key battleground states of North Carolina, Florida and Arizona, which he carried in 2016. Polls have also shown Biden with a lead nationally, less than 100 days out from the election.