In Michigan, attack ads are inescapable. Are they changing any minds?

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/oct/31/presidential-election-attack-ads-michigan

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TV, radio and mailboxes in Saginaw, Michigan, and any place likely to decide next week’s election, are being bombarded

There is almost no escape. One minute, you’re watching the spin of a wheel on a game show and a few seconds later, Jeffrey Epstein is staring out of the screen with a youthful Donald Trump at his side.

What follows is yet another of the election ads bombarding viewers in Saginaw, Michigan, or any other place likely to decide the outcome of next week’s presidential election. The attack ad goes on to remind viewers that Epstein was accused of sex trafficking and abusing girls as young as 14 years old, and that Trump spent a lot of time in his company.

“1992, Trump was there. 93, Trump was there. 97, Trump was there. 2000, Trump was there. He was there. Still trust him?” the voiceover asks.

When it’s not Epstein to darken the mood, the ads flit from pictures of people said to have been murdered by immigrants to clips of Trump promising to make the rich richer. Alongside them run sinister spots with white-supremacist overtones and stark warnings that your family will know whether you don’t vote and Trump wins.

The only way to escape is to turn the television off or switch to the Cartoon Network. But then there are the ad-laden radio stations and the constant political flyers pouring through the mailbox.

In what is expected to be a knife-edge US election decided by a few voters in a handful of key battleground states, the Guardian is exploring Saginaw, Michigan. It is a swing area in a swing state whose voters will bear an outsize influence on the outcome of the fight between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump. Chris McGreal is on the ground in Saginaw in the run up to November's election examining the issues that voters of all political backgrounds care about.

Saginaw voters: tell us which issues will decide the US election

Voters in Saginaw – and Michigan as a whole – have endured months of relentless election ads attempting to land a punch in a matter of seconds with simplistic, and often distorted or outright false, claims. But none is a knockout blow and so the ads punch time and again – Kamala Harris is selling out American workers to China, Trump will stop workers being paid overtime – in an attempt to send voters reeling from one candidate to the other. Or at least get them out to vote.

Most of the year, television news bulletins are bookended by ads for prescription drugs aimed at the older demographic that still sits down to watch the nightly news. But with the election only days away, the promotion of medicines and cheap mattresses has been pushed aside by the torrent of political advertising. They’re everywhere. In the middle of movies, during reruns of Family Ties, even on the weather channels.

Occasionally, the ads illuminate. Some of the Harris spots focus on how she intends to help people buy their first homes or get a small business off the ground. But mostly, they stoke fears and prejudices.

Trump-supporting ads repeatedly attempt to pin responsibility for the “immigration crisis” on Harris as the Biden administration’s “border tsar”, even though administration of the frontier was not her job and there are few immigrants in places like Saginaw.

The screen fills with crime victims and a caption denouncing “Kamala’s open border agenda” as a voice intones that “they were bludgeoned, raped, strangled, stabbed, shot, murdered”.

“More American lives will be lost if she isn’t stopped. Kamala Harris created the border crisis. She won’t fix it now,” it said.

Much of this is not paid for by the campaigns themselves but political action committees (Pacs) permitted to raise and spend millions in support of a candidate provided they do not directly coordinate with the campaigns. But the source of the money is often shadowy.

Neither are some ads what they seem. One focused on the Detroit area proclaimed: “Kamala Harris stands with Israel.”

But the ad, funded by a Trump-supporting Pac, was intended to undercut support for Harris within Michigan’s sizeable Arab American community over Israel killing more than 43,000 Palestinians in Gaza, the majority of them women and children.

The same group, FC Pac, was also behind a message emphasising that the vice-president’s husband in Jewish, and another featuring Harris and Elissa Slotkin, a Democratic member of Congress who is running for a Michigan seat in the US Senate.

“When protesters went after Israel, Harris and Slotkin didn’t back down. Harris and Slotkin are the pro-Israel team we can trust!” one message said.

In response, Harris has been running spots in Arabic denouncing Trump over the supreme court striking down the constitutional right to an abortion and his plans to cut social security.

There is occasional relief with an attempt to raise a smile.

Kristen McDonald Rivet, the Democratic candidate for Congress for the seat that includes Saginaw county, recorded an ad in a bar affirming broader Michigander loyalties.

“I root for the Lions. I hate Ohio. And I think most politicians are full of shit,” she said, with the “shit” half bleeped out, before grabbing a pint of beer sliding down the bar.

In an earlier ad, McDonald Rivet’s husband dived out of a moving car to escape her endless talk about cutting taxes.

In an altogether more sinister vein, Duty to America, which has spent $23m on ads attacking Harris, is broadcasting one that shows a series of photographs of white people who are said to have been “left behind”.

“Even if we do everything right, Harris and the Democrats find new ways to make us pay. For what? No matter what we do, Democrats are against us. So this November, we’re against them,” it said.

Even when viewers get a break from the onslaught, there are still echoes. One pro-Trump ad gave way to a local college promoting its training course in medical billing, a reminder of the US’s politically contentious private healthcare system.

It’s not clear how many minds the ads are changing, if any. But the election in bellwether Saginaw, and swing state Michigan, is highly likely to be decided by turnout. Trump won both in 2016 when Democratic voters stayed away but lost four years later, even though he increased his vote tally, because Democrats turned out in much larger numbers to remove him from power.

With that in mind, a liberal group, Future Forward USA Action, which has spent more than $370m in support of Democrats during this election cycle, has taken a different tack.

The screen fills with black letters on a grey screen telling those who do not vote that they will have helped put Trump back in the White House if he wins, and their families will blame them.

“Who you vote for is private, but if you vote is public information. After this election, your voting record will be updated. And your friends and family will be able to look up how often you vote. So vote,” it said.