It’s Election Day and Democrats are flooding battleground states with ads aimed at driving young voters at colleges and big universities to vote for Kamala Harris before polls close.
Images of the Democratic presidential candidate—with the implicit message: Vote for Her—will be seen atop roaming trucks in college towns, on more than 100 billboards, and staring at students who use campus kiosks, the Democratic National Committee tells the Daily Beast exclusively.
The six-figure ad blitz across all seven battleground states is the final shot, the buzzer-beater, to capture the support of students who will, by and large, be voting for the first time.
ADVERTISEMENT
The final-day ads will also appear in the form of digital screens inside convenience stores, scrolling like Lotto ads screaming out at gamblers. The biggest targets will be the “Blue Wall” states of Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania—where nearly three dozen of the new billboards will appear.
Voters will see the ads in 1,700 convenience stores across a state known for its Wawa-Sheetz rivalry, the DNC tells the Beast.
The committee is eager to turn out young voters and Black voters across the battlegrounds. It is putting up 300 digital kiosks across college campuses that include the University of North Carolina and its affiliated campuses, Michigan State University, Temple University, Marquette University, and the University of Wisconsin.
Harris campaign aides say the Blue Wall looks especially promising for the Democratic presidential candidate, though they insist she has other paths to victory to defeat her Republican rival, Donald Trump.
The vice president spent the entirety of her last day on the campaign trail knocking on doors and hosting rallies in Pennsylvania, the swing state that carries the most electoral votes.
The party did not specify the exact amount of its final six-figure push, but DNC Chair Jaime Harrison called the effort the “capstone of a more than $7 million campaign.”
“Today, Democrats are reaching every voter possible in the final hours of Election Day across critical battleground states,” Harrison said in a statement. “As a final push, we are launching thousands of out of home ads—from billboards to convenience stores—to make sure voters can get to the polls before they close in the most important election of our lifetimes.”
The ads will remain up until polls close.
Find the Daily Beast’s coverage of the 2024 election here. Subscribe to The New Abnormal on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts, Stitcher, Amazon Music, or Overcast.
