If you live in a crucial swing state, prepare to be afraid. The Harris-Walz campaign is launching a barrage of ads Wednesday painting Donald Trump as a vengeful despot who would wield “extreme and dangerous” power in a second term.
Until Election Day on Nov. 5, the campaign said, voters in battleground states “will hear every single day about the existential danger Trump’s Project 2025 agenda poses to American democracy, freedom, and the middle class.”
The spotlight ad, titled “Control,” features Trump himself saying he will “wield that power very aggressively.” Democrats say that means Trump would target his political rivals, fire civil servants, slash social safety net programs like Medicare and Social Security, and allow states to monitor women’s pregnancies.
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The TV and digital ad campaign is part of a massive $370 million effort to flood markets ahead of the first ABC presidential debate between Kamala Harris and Trump on Sept. 10.
“Our campaign is going to take every opportunity to lay out in stark contrast Donald Trump’s dark and extreme vision for this country,” Harris-Walz principal deputy campaign manager Quentin Fulks said in a release. “On September 10, Donald Trump will be forced to answer for his ties to Project 2025, but our campaign won’t waste a minute communicating to the voters who will decide this election.”
After first suggesting he might not, Trump announced on Tuesday that he will, in fact, debate Harris on Sept. 10. However, the Trump and Harris campaigns are still in discussions with ABC News about whether the participants’ microphones will be on or muted when a candidate isn’t speaking, which could give an unfair advantage to the candidate most likely to interrupt.
The Project 2025 ad campaign also has a significant social media component as the Harris campaign seeks to reach young voters and others who may not be tuned into political coverage. On TikTok, 70 percent of those who viewed Project 2025 content came from their “For You” page in June, according to the Harris-Walz campaign, not because they followed the campaign. “Project 2025 content also garnered 11 million impressions across @KamalaHQ accounts during the convention alone, and has remained in the top 5 of best-performing topics across social platforms since our accounts began posting about it,” the campaign said.
The Trump campaign is running its own more modest ad buy, including advertising in Trump’s home turf of West Palm Beach, raising eyebrows about how solidly red or MAGA Florida is.
Harris and her running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, meanwhile, are heading to Georgia Wednesday for a two-day bus tour culminating with a rally in Savannah on Thursday—the same day the pair will give a joint interview to CNN to air that evening at 9 p.m.
