Vice President Kamala Harris’s presidential campaign is running versions of this 60-second ad, titled “Different Visions” — with the same audio but different images — on stations in each of the seven battleground states and in Omaha. The campaign has spent $2.3 million on the ad since early September, according to AdImpact.
On the Screen
The audio in each of the ads was recorded when Ms. Harris delivered a speech outlining her economic plans in North Carolina in August. The visual scenes, as the ads begin, are appropriate to each targeted electorate: In Wisconsin, it is the Milwaukee skyline; in Michigan, it’s Detroit, and so on in Pennsylvania, Georgia and North Carolina. Nebraska’s ad shows just corn and farmland.
A car’s side-view mirror represents the past. Other images include a multiracial family at a dinner table, an older man in a cornfield, a young woman dancing alone while stocking a supermarket shelf, bins of fresh tomatoes and vegetables, a crowd at a Harris event cheering, the words “tax cut,” a house under construction, people happily carrying boxes into a house, and several shots of Ms. Harris speaking.
The version of the ad running in Arizona and Nevada substitutes scenes of the desert and residential sprawl for city skylines, a Latino construction worker for the family at a dinner table and a restaurant worker sorting red peppers for the woman dancing in the supermarket. It also displays Spanish translations of Ms. Harris’s words.
The Script
Ms. Harris: “This election is about two very different visions for our nation: one focused on the future, and the other focused on the past. When the middle class is strong, America is strong. Lowering the cost of living will be a defining goal of my presidency. I’ll lower the cost of insulin and prescription drugs for everyone. And I will work to pass the first-ever federal ban on price gouging on food. More than 100 million Americans will get a tax cut. We will end America’s housing shortage by building three million new homes and rentals that are affordable for the middle class. Together, we will build an economy where everyone can compete and have a real chance to succeed. Now is the time to chart a new way forward.”
Accuracy
The ad makes no verifiable claims.
The Takeaway
In polling from The New York Times and Siena College, 25 percent of voters said they needed to learn more about Ms. Harris before voting for her. This ad tries to reach precisely that slice of the electorate by laying out the details she has presented about her plans for the economy — the things she would aim to do, as opposed to the elements of Donald Trump’s agenda that she would aim to block.
That the Harris campaign is pushing this identical message across all of the presidential battlegrounds suggests that the campaign’s own research has come to the same conclusion as the polling — and that it will continue, at great expense, to try to educate the country about Ms. Harris’s plans.
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