As the Harris campaign continues to court male voters, it is dialing up a deep shot, targeting a venue where it thinks it will reach quite a few of them: professional football.
The campaign is spending six figures on flyover advertisements knocking former President Donald J. Trump and promoting Vice President Kamala Harris at four N.F.L. games that are taking place on Sunday in swing states, with teams in those matchups collectively accounting for six of the seven main presidential battlegrounds.
The four games are in Wisconsin, where the Green Bay Packers will host the Arizona Cardinals; Nevada, where the Las Vegas Raiders will host the Pittsburgh Steelers; North Carolina, where the Carolina Panthers will host the Atlanta Falcons; and Pennsylvania, where the Philadelphia Eagles will host the Cleveland Browns. (Michigan is the only swing state left out, with its Detroit Lions playing in Dallas on Sunday.)
In Las Vegas, fans will see skytyping planes fly over the stadium to draw a simple message in white: “Vote Kamala.” In the other venues, a plane with a banner will deliver a slightly longer plea: “Sack Trump’s Project 2025! Vote Kamala!” In Philadelphia, that message will include a nod to the home team: “Go Birds!”
The campaign is part of an effort to attract hard-to-reach voters, especially men, said Abhi Rahman, a spokesman for the Democratic National Committee.
“Our goal is to meet people where they are, and there is only a sliver of the electorate that is still undecided,” Mr. Rahman said. “What we know about these undecided people — majority male — is they don’t like to read political publications. They aren’t in the 24-7 world of policy and politics, so what we are trying to do is reach them in a different way.”
N.F.L. fans skew heavily male, as does the audience of sports talk radio and television, a genre that has produced a number of conservative voices in recent years.
The Harris campaign’s efforts to court more male voters come as polling suggests there could be a historic gender gap this election, with women picking Ms. Harris by large margins and men strongly backing Mr. Trump.
The skytyping and banners will provide a quick message, but Mr. Rahman said the campaign nonetheless thought they might be more fruitful than another barrage of television advertisements, into which the campaign and its allied groups have already poured hundreds of millions of dollars. “Our theory is people are starting to tune those out, too,” he said.
A win, Mr. Rahman said, will be if the effort prompts people to research Project 2025, the blueprint of conservative policy proposals for a future Republican administration that was written by many of Mr. Trump’s allies and former administration officials, but from which he has tried to distance himself.
After taking a cautious approach throughout the first stage of an abbreviated campaign, Ms. Harris and her running mate, Gov. Tim Walz of Minnesota, have embarked on a news media blitz in recent weeks, sitting for both sit-down television interviews and less traditional mediums as they try to introduce themselves more fully to voters and reach those who might need more encouragement to turn out.
Mr. Walz recently appeared on Jimmy Kimmel’s late-night television show, while Ms. Harris took questions on “Call Her Daddy,” a podcast particularly popular with younger women.
Ms. Harris’s campaign is especially trying to reach younger male voters, a group that surveys show has increasingly leaned toward Mr. Trump. Mr. Walz is emphasizing football and hunting in his campaign events this weekend. On Friday, the campaign announced a “Hunters and Anglers for Harris-Walz” coalition. And on Thursday, in Pittsburgh, former President Barack Obama delivered a pointed message to Black men, instructing them to get onboard with voting for a woman for president.
Mr. Walz, a former high school football coach, has spoken for months about how Democrats are reclaiming football from Republicans as he talks about the cultural divide between the two parties.
“They’re not taking the family from us. So we’re taking freedom, we’re taking the flag, and we’re taking the family,” he said at a fund-raiser in August. “It was me who took the football back. I’m going to take that one.”
The post Harris Campaign to Fly Ads Over N.F.L. Games in Swing States appeared first on New York Times.
