On Monday, Hillary Clinton unveiled her first attack ad aimed directly at Donald Trump: a 30-second spot highlighting some of the more worrisome comments the Republican front-runner has made about immigration and abortion this campaign. While it’s part of a relatively meager “high six-figure” ad buy in New York City, it’s unlikely to be the last from Hillary and her deep-pocketed allies. As Clinton super-ally David Brock boasted to a roomful of wealthy liberal donors that night, his team of opposition researchers has amassed enough material on the celebrity businessman to “knock Trump Tower down to the sub-basement.”
While it remains to be seen just how much damage Democrats would be able to inflict in a general election matchup against Trump should they get it—and even whether they would need to do all that much damage to begin with—it’s worth noting that the billionaire has already withstood a remarkable amount of attack ads this cycle. According to the New York Times’ latest tally, nearly $70 million of the $132 million spent on negative television ads by presidential candidates in either party and by their aligned outside groups has targeted Trump. And that anti-Trump number doesn’t even include the nearly $24 million in attack ads paid for by the Club for Growth, Our Principles PAC, and the American Future Fund, three super PACs that are unaligned with specific candidates but that have spent heavily to derail the billionaire.
The Trump-attacking total is remarkable for a number of reasons, chief among them that the GOP race alone began with 17 candidates last summer and remains (ostensibly, at least) a three-candidate race almost a year later—and, of course, that Trump sat atop the Republican polls back when the field was crowded and continues to do so now that it’s narrowed. All that cash has likely contributed to Trump’s falling favorability rating, but it hasn’t been enough to end his front-running reign in the GOP race.
It’s also evidence of just how desperate the stop-Trump forces within the conservative establishment have become. The real estate tycoon’s opponents, remember, waited for months before spending substantial sums to hit Trump on television, a delay that was originally attributed to the belief that he would soon fade all on his own and later to their fears of his counter-punching prowess. (It wasn’t until late last year that John Kasich’s and Jeb Bush’s super PACs finally pulled the trigger on seven-figure ad buys hitting the polling leader.) The vast majority of that $70 million anti-Trump spending, then, has come in the past several months.
Meanwhile, according to the Times, Trump has spent only $16 million on television ads of any kind during the entire 2016 primary, less than a fifth of the money spent attacking him over the airwaves. That number, though, tells only part of the story. Trump has rarely opened his checkbook this year because he hasn’t needed to. He was the beneficiary of an estimated $1.9 billion—yes, billion with a B—in free media from the start of the campaign up through February, according to data collected by coverage-tracking firm MediaQuant. That was roughly $1.2 billion more than the amount received by Hillary Clinton over that same time and roughly $1.6 billion more than Ted Cruz, the candidate who received the second-most free media in the GOP race. Those numbers include coverage of all kinds—positive, negative, and neutral—though for some of Trump’s most diehard supporters, there doesn’t seem to be a big difference between positive and negative coverage of Trump. As focus groups have shown, Trump fans only rally around their man more when presented with unflattering information about him. And given Trump’s general insult-comic-at-an-open-mic approach to politics, a not insignificant slice of Trump coverage doubled as attack ads on his rivals, as everyone from Lindsey Graham’s cellphone to “low-energy” Jeb Bush to “Little” Marco Rubio to “Lyin’” Ted Cruz can attest.
Trump’s challenge should he win the nomination, though, will be different than the one he’s faced in the primary to date. Since surging to the top of the GOP polls early last fall, Trump has largely only needed to hold on to his existing supporters in the face of mounting attacks from Republicans. In a general election campaign, though, Trump would need to find a way to win over new ones while being battered by attacks from Democrats. Given the barrage of attacks he faced—and all the coverage he’s received—new fans will be particularly hard to come by.
