Dark Money Liberal Group Begins $75 Million Campaign To Defeat Trump
A liberal organization has announced the start of its $75 million campaign to try to defeat President Donald Trump in swing states in 2020.
The 501(c)(4) dark money group, Acronym, launched the “Four is Enough” campaign to focus on battleground states: Arizona, Michigan, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, according to The New York Times.
Florida was missing from the original swing state list even though it is usually included as a battleground state.
The digital advertisement campaign was started to try to counter Trump’s online advertising efforts.
As a non-profit organization, the majority of Acronym’s funding should be used for “social welfare,” however, the company has a variety of for-profit companies beneath it, The Washington Free Beacon reported.
According to Politico, Trump and the Republican National Committee have raised over $300 million for Trump’s re-election campaign.
At this point in the year, Trump’s campaign has spent almost $23 million on television and digital advertising. A Facebook Ads report shows that Trump’s campaign page has spent $14.3 million on Facebook ads this year.
The only Democratic candidate to come close to that amount of money spent on Facebook is Tom Steyer with $9.93 million.
“The gun on this general election does not start when we have a nominee; it started months ago,” said David Plouffe, who managed Barack Obama’s 2008 campaign and recently joined Acronym’s board, according to The Times.
“If the things that need to happen don’t happen in these battleground states between now and May or June our nominee will never have time to catch up.”
The Democratic nominee won’t be chosen until the Democratic National Convention in July 2020, so Trump is currently in command of the entire process.
“We don’t know if the Democratic candidate is going to be able to even compete with such a shorter timeline, even if they have significant resources after the convention,” Acronym founder and chief executive Tara McGowan told Politico.
As of November, McGowan said Acronym has already raised about 40 percent of the $75 million budget.
“We’re absolutely, as a party, not doing enough and I don’t know that $75 million is enough,” McGowan said. “We can’t afford to not do this work right now.”
“Trump has upped the ante by spending more than any candidate this early in a general election campaign,” she later added, “and right now our side is simply not on the field.”
Acronym is trying to aid the future candidate by focusing the digital campaign on how Trump and the Democratic Party are each viewed by the public during this primary season.
Digital advertisements will be featured across multiple platforms including Google, YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, Hulu and Pandora.
“Our nominee is going to be broke, tired, have to pull together the party and turn around on a dime and run a completely different race for a completely different audience,” Plouffe told The Times.
“There is an enormous amount of danger between now and then. If the hole is too steep to dig out of, they’re not going to win.”
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