Although Oregon’s presidential primary won’t be held until mid-May, Democratic candidate Michael Bloomberg has already been burning up the airwaves in Portland.
Since late November, he’s spent more than $2 million on ads at local TV stations while the other presidential candidates have been focused on early-voting states like Iowa and New Hampshire.
Bloomberg, the former New York mayor and billionaire, is using his own wealth to mount a huge TV advertising blitz aimed at swaying voters in the nearly 30 states that will hold primary contests in March. Washington holds its primary on March 10, and that’s where the Portland TV stations come in. They provide local broadcast coverage for southwest Washington.
“Vancouver and the area around it is a target for us,” said Katie Rodihan, a Washington state spokeswoman for the Bloomberg campaign, “so we’re mobilizing the Portland media market to reach those voters.”
The ads don’t make any reference to Washington’s presidential primary. Instead, they focus on Bloomberg’s record as mayor as he helped New York recover from the 9/11 attacks — and on his expensive and well-publicized campaigns dealing with guns, tobacco and climate change. Or as he puts it in one ad, he’s beat Big Coal, Big Tobacco and “America’s biggest gun lobby.”
Democratic presidential candidate former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg speaks to reporters after a campaign event, Monday, Jan. 27, 2020, in Burlington, Vt.
Mary Altaffer/AP
Regular viewers of local TV news shows — and of quiz shows like “Jeopardy!” and “Wheel of Fortune” or sitcoms like “Last Man Standing” — will find it hard to avoid Bloomberg’s repeated ad pitches.
“This is certainly unusual to see this kind of spending this early on,” said Bob Singer, president of the Oregon Association of Broadcasters, “but I guess that’s what you get when you have billionaires placing dollars.”
Bloomberg is not your average billionaire. The founder of a financial data services and media company, Bloomberg is the country’s 11th wealthiest person in America and has an estimated net worth of $61.5 billion, according to Forbes Magazine.
He’s largely skipped campaigning in Iowa, which holds it’s first-in-the-nation caucus on Monday evening. Instead, he’s bought $228 million in broadcast advertising for the March round of state primaries, according to an estimate from Kantar/Campaign Media Analysis Group that’s tracking ad spending in partnership with FiveThirtyEight.
Altogether, Bloomberg is responsible for more than half of the total TV ad spending by all of the presidential candidates, including President Donald Trump. On Sunday, Bloomberg and Trump will be the only candidates to air ads at the Super Bowl.
Kantar estimates that Bloomberg has spent $2.4 million in Oregon, compared to $5.6 million for Washington broadcast outlets. Those estimates include radio buys in addition to TV.
Disclosure reports filed with the Federal Communications Commission show that the four major commercial TV stations in Oregon booked nearly $2.2 million in ads from the Bloomberg campaign. Most of the people reached by those commercials won’t have a say in Washington’s primary. Only about 20% of the people in the Portland-Vancouver metropolitan area live in Washington.
Candidates are often forced to buy ads in media markets that cover much larger areas than the ones they’re campaigning in. For example, Rep. Jaime Herrera Beutler, R-Wash., and Democratic rival Carolyn Long — and the party committees supporting them — spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on Portland TV advertising in their 2018 contest.
“If they are going to be competitive, they have to spend some money on TV,” said Mark Stephan, a political science professor at Washington State University’s Vancouver campus.
Sill, it’s not the most cost-efficient way to reach voters, Stephan added, but “somebody like Bloomberg can get away with it.”
Singer, the Oregon broadcasters association president, said Bloomberg’s advertising comes at a generally fallow time for political advertising in Oregon. If it continues for several more months, he said, it could start to affect TV ad prices for other candidates and even for regular commercial advertisers.
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February 01, 2020 at 05:28AM
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Michael Bloomberg Spends Big On Portland TV Ads In Search Of Voters In SW Washington - OPB News
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