Nearly $26 million of her monthly expenses went to produce and air a blizzard of television and online commercials – part of what has been a $120 million ad bombardment by her campaign. Clinton campaigned in OH and Pennsylvania this past week, and the Democratic nominee’s voter registration efforts and policy pitches went largely unnoticed as Trump shook up his campaign staff.
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The good news for Trump is that the election isn’t being held today and a new national poll out from Pew Research shows some of Clinton’s post-convention glory may be fading a bit.
The campaign paid Giles-Parscale $8.4 million in July, about twice what the San Antonio firm had collected from it over the course of the preceding year. Earlier this week, Trump reshuffled his campaign leadership while his campaign chief, Paul Manafort, faced increased scrutiny over his work with pro-Russian political groups in the Ukraine. Brad Parscale, the president, is the campaign’s director of digital marketing.
Millions more went to air travel. Later in the day, Trump asked African-American voters in MI to take a chance on him.
The Trump filings also show some old ties.
If Donald Trump was to win all the remaining battleground states on the map, he’d still be shy of the 270 votes needed to win the White House which means he is going to have to pick off at least one of the states now leaning in Hillary Clinton’s direction in addition to running the table in those battlegrounds.
“This morning, Paul Manafort offered, and I accepted, his resignation from the campaign”, Trump said in a statement, thanking him for “his great work” and proclaiming him a “true professional”.
Clinton’s campaign has spent the summer flooding the airwaves with television ads, building out field operations in the states and attracting Republican support.
The sharp imbalance is driven in part by the real estate tycoon’s belief that he does not need to pay for the usual campaign tools, relying instead on his social media reach and coverage of his raucous rallies.
Also Friday, Trump started airing his first ads of the general election after moving a day earlier to invest almost $5 million in battleground state advertising.
The billionaire also trails his Democratic rival when it comes to raising money.
Trump has relied heavily on the Republican National Committee for conventional campaign infrastructure. That came close to the $90 million that Clinton raised in conjunction with the Democratic party in July.
But Clinton gets into the details at her events, plugging registration and urging people to cast absentee ballots. But Trump’s campaign reported just $36 million in receipts last month.
It is unclear why more money was not transferred from the joint fundraising committees, which are not scheduled to file their next finance reports until October 15.
That adds 37 more electoral votes to Clinton’s total and puts her at 273 electoral votes – just ahead of the needed 270 electoral votes to win the White House. And he’s boasted of holding the line on his campaign spending.
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Trump’s public demeanor and speech delivery have only further improved since then even if keeping him on message has meant more use of Teleprompters, allowing his critics to ignore this important evolution and focus instead on his occasionally slightly stilted delivery.
