US election: Donald Trump’s campaign unleashes barrage of attack ads in fight against Kamala Harris

The presidential race has been upended over the past two months, but a Donald Trump rally is still a Donald Trump rally.

Thousands of supporters flocked to see him at a recent one in southwest Pennsylvania.

As usual, vendors sold a variety of ever-evolving merchandise to satisfy all sorts of MAGA fans. (“If you’re not wearing a Trump hat, you might get mistaken for a Democrat,” one winking seller warned.)

A breakdancer with a Trump mask performed for those standing in a line that stretched around a corner and up a hill. Attendees either mocked or ignored the handful of anti-Trump protesters outside.

And Mr Trump was very much himself, bragging to delighted fans about how he had mastered “the weave”. He explained: “I’ll talk about like nine different things, and they all come back brilliantly together, and it’s like, friends of mine that are, like, English professors, they say, ‘It’s the most brilliant thing I’ve ever seen.’”

Mr Trump left the Republican National Convention in July a clear front-runner against Joe Biden. The emergence of Kamala Harris — a fresh face, virtually always on-message — reset the contest.

Mr Trump initially appeared off when grappling with his new opponent, but as the campaign reaches its final phase, his advisers and allies have established a clear strategy.

They are betting heavily on attack ads that paint Ms Harris as an out-of-touch leftist who is soft on crime and immigration.

One goal is to persuade voters that Ms Harris — who wants the election to be a referendum on her rival — should be held accountable as the number two official in a “weak and pathetic administration”.

The approach may be working: Mr Biden’s winning coalition from 2020 had fallen apart during his re-election bid, and Ms Harris has only partially rebuilt it, despite the progress she has made in the polls in a short time.

Her support among those under 30 has fallen 12 points below what Mr Biden earned in 2020, according to Wall Street Journal polling.

She lags ten points with black voters and Hispanic support has dropped six points. These gaps could be decisive given that Mr Biden won the presidency four years ago by a margin of just 44,000 votes in three swing states.

Currently 53 per cent of Americans view Mr Trump unfavourably, according to FiveThirtyEight, a data-journalism outfit.

This mattered less when Mr Trump was running against Mr Biden, who voters disliked even more. But Ms Harris now earns favourable ratings from 46 per cent of Americans, almost the same share who view her unfavourably.

With Mr Trump’s numbers seemingly immovable it will be hard for him to win unless he brings down Ms Harris, as he did in his successful contest against Hillary Clinton.

The campaign and allied groups are investing heavily in this strategy. In the week leading up to the Trump rally in Johnstown, 57 per cent of television spending came from the Trump campaign and allied super PACs.

All of it was attack ads against Ms Harris, according to AdImpact, a media-tracking firm. The Harris campaign and its allies advertised less during that period and took a less negative approach. Less than a fifth of the ads for Ms Harris were devoted solely to attacking Mr Trump; the rest promoted Ms Harris or compared her favourably with Mr Trump.

Chris LaCivita, a senior Trump campaign adviser, certainly knows how to drag down an opponent.

During the 2004 presidential race, the longtime Republican operative and Marine Corps veteran played a key role in Swift Boat Veterans for Truth.

The political advocacy organisation turned the military service of John Kerry, the Democratic nominee, into a liability with a series of ads questioning his record during the Vietnam War. Mr Kerry had been leading George Bush over the summer but saw his lead erode as the ads aired.

The evidence about campaign-ad effectiveness is mixed, but researchers at Northwestern University have found that negative ads suppress voting more than positive ads encourage it.

Mr Trump’s negative spots about Ms Harris concentrate on immigration and crime. One lists several illegal migrants who were arrested for committing violent crimes and then set free: “Who released every one of them? Liberal DA Kamala Harris. The victims’ blood is on her hands.”

Another warns that Ms Harris wants to provide “amnesty for the 10m illegals she allowed in as border tsar”, which eventually “will lead to cuts in your Social Security benefits”.

No one has ever accused Mr Trump of subtlety. Yet the relentless negativity is making Trump fans nervous. “I do wish he would stick to the policy more than the name-calling,” said Doug Feathers, a 46-year-old from Hollidaysburg, Pennsylvania. “I don’t disagree with his name-calling. I do enjoy the entertainment. But stick to the policy for the voters out there that are still undecided.”

While Mr Trump outspent Ms Harris in the final week of August, she has committed several times as much to advertising in the final days of the campaign.

The Harris campaign currently has committed $52.4m compared with $14.1m by Team Trump for the week of October 22.

And so far Mr Trump only leads in total spending in Georgia.

Democrats have committed more money in every other swing state. Having invested early on in ads that promote Ms Harris’s biography and her youthful summer job at McDonalds, it isn’t clear whether Democratic strategists will decide to match Mr Trump’s brutal attacks as election day nears.