One of the biggest super PACs supporting former President Donald J. Trump is adding $70 million to its television and digital reservations in the final six weeks of the campaign, including the first significant Republican super PAC ad buy in North Carolina since Labor Day.
The super PAC, MAGA Inc., is pouring the funds into four battleground states — North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Georgia and Arizona. The $70 million comes on top of $30 million in pre-existing ad buys by the group, for a total spending of $100 million in the final stage of the race.
Most of the group’s money is going into Pennsylvania, officials at the super PAC said. The former president’s advisers and allies believe that a Trump win in Pennsylvania would block Vice President Kamala Harris’s path to the White House.
But the spending in North Carolina reflects what has become a more competitive race there.
The super PAC plans to run crime-focused ads designed to portray Ms. Harris as a radical leftist, according to officials at the group. They will use examples of her record as a prosecutor in San Francisco to make the case that she is soft on crime. It’s a strategy Republicans have reliably used since the Nixon era.
Ms. Harris has been highlighting her record as a prosecutor, in part in an effort to blunt voters’ concerns about her being too liberal, according to two people with direct knowledge of her approach, who were not authorized to discuss the strategy publicly.
Trump allies have been anxious to prevent Ms. Harris from successfully distancing herself from her past liberal positions — particularly those she took as a presidential candidate in 2019 — and selling herself as the “change” candidate.
The Trump forces are trying to ensure that voters associate her with incumbency, and especially with President Biden. The super PAC plans to continue an effort to yoke Ms. Harris to the most unpopular parts of Mr. Biden’s record, to try to make voters feel she is equally responsible.
Officials at MAGA Inc. are coordinating with other pro-Trump super PACs.
Preserve America, a super PAC funded by the billionaire Miriam Adelson, is focused on Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania. It has nearly $30 million in television ad reservations in those two states, according to records from AdImpact. And Right for America — a super PAC steered by Sergio Gor, an ally of Mr. Trump, and seeded in part by Ike Perlmutter, the billionaire former chief executive of Marvel Entertainment — has recently made a $40 million advertising reservation between now and Election Day.
The Trump campaign itself has been running ads attacking Ms. Harris for higher prices. The ads include clips of her praising “Bidenomics” as effective. But the paid messages have often been drowned out by Mr. Trump’s undisciplined speeches and debate riffs, including the airing of baseless rumors, such as his claims that Haitian migrants in Ohio are eating people’s pets.
Ms. Harris has an enormous financial advantage over Mr. Trump. Her main super PAC, Future Forward, began reserving its $250 million fall ad buy last winter. One of the goals of groups like MAGA Inc. is to make last-minute ad buys so that the final few weeks of the campaign are as evenly matched as possible.
MAGA Inc. is spending much of its money on so-called persuadable voters in the battleground states. These are undecided voters — roughly three million people in seven battleground states — whose allegiances are up for grabs. The super PAC is echoing the Trump campaign’s testosterone-fueled strategy, zeroing in on men aged 18 to 44. The group is buying advertising on streaming services, including YouTube TV, with a focus on live sports like the N.F.L., college football and Major League Baseball.
The super PAC’s new investment in North Carolina shows how much Ms. Harris has transformed the race.
Before Mr. Biden dropped out on July 21, Trump allies didn’t imagine they’d have to spend millions of dollars in North Carolina. The state was closely fought for in 2020 — Mr. Trump won by only 70,000 votes — but Mr. Trump had opened up a solid lead there against Mr. Biden earlier this year. Instead of competing to flip North Carolina, the Biden team had been forced into worrying about defending states that should have been safe for a Democrat, such as Virginia and Minnesota.
Future Forward, the Democratic super PAC, has small ad buys reserved in the final days of the race in blue states, including Minnesota and New Hampshire, in case those states emerge as unexpectedly competitive.
But since entering the race and quickly securing the nomination, Ms. Harris has tightened the gap in North Carolina to the point where she and Mr. Trump are polling within the margin of error. Ms. Harris has strong support from Black and college-educated voters in the state. She has also been helped by the scandal surrounding the Republican candidate for governor, Mark Robinson. Democrats have been running ads showing Mr. Trump as he praised Mr. Robinson, who, in addition to being linked by a CNN report to disturbing comments on a pornographic website, has staked out hard-line positions on abortion.
If Ms. Harris wins North Carolina, it’s hard to see how Mr. Trump could win the election. Mr. Trump’s advisers see their clearest path to the presidency in holding North Carolina and then adding wins in Pennsylvania and Georgia. Only one Democratic presidential candidate has won North Carolina this century: Barack Obama in 2008.
In a memo sent to allies on Tuesday, the senior officials at MAGA Inc., David Lee and Chris Grant, shared highlights of their internal polling. They said that in 42 separate statewide surveys in the seven battleground states since Mr. Biden quit the race, Mr. Trump “has led or tied in 40 of them” and trailed twice in Wisconsin by one percentage point or less.
Mr. Lee and Mr. Grant added that in their polling, Mr. Trump had never trailed in Arizona, Nevada, Pennsylvania, North Carolina, Michigan or Georgia since Ms. Harris became the nominee. Those results are more favorable to Mr. Trump than some recent public polls. Those polls show Ms. Harris leading Mr. Trump in some of these states.
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