Trump Campaign To Begin Running Swing State Ads On Friday

The Wall Street Journal reports Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump’s campaign will debut its first ads in battleground states — Ohio, Pennsylvania, Florida, North Carolina and Virginia — on Friday.

The ads come months after more than $100 million worth of Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton’s ads have already aired, most of which attacked Trump as not being fit for the presidency in nine swing states.

Recently, during the Olympics, the Clinton campaign ran an ad in heavy rotation pointing out that Trump-branded apparel is made in China and Bangladesh.

Thus far, pro-Trump ads have mostly been put out by the National Rifle Association and two super PACs, although Trump’s campaign says it began August with $37 million in cash available.

Many Republicans have been vocal about wanting Trump to start using those funds to run ads in an effort to stop his recent slide in the polls.

To win the presidency, Trump will likely have to be victorious in all the states the last GOP nominee, Mitt Romney, won four years ago, while adding Ohio, Pennsylvania and Florida.

However, recent polls have Trump trailing in all five states where he is beginning to run ads on Friday, with Pennsylvania looking so far out of reach for the Republican nominee that the Clinton-supporting super PAC Priorities USA announced this week that it was canceling three weeks of ads there in September, as well as in Virginia and Colorado.

“Right now, we are going to look at other opportunities for us to expand the map and potentially reach out to some new voters as well through voter registration and on-the-ground efforts in some of our key states,” said chief strategist Guy Cecil.

Trump bragged early on about the possibility of being competitive not just in the traditional “swing states” but in longtime Democrat states like Michigan, Wisconsin, Connecticut and New York as well.

However, polls show all of those states to be a long shot for Trump. Therefore, the businessman’s campaign has decided to play it safe and use its resources to buy ads in the traditional, voter-rich battleground states.

The latest NBC battleground map forecasts Clinton with 288 electoral votes to 174 for Trump. Seventy-six are considered a tossup.

Six states — Colorado, New Hampshire, North Carolina, Virginia, Pennsylvania and Nebraska — were just changed from tossups to “leans Democratic.”

Clinton, however, lost some ground in Florida, which NBC now says is a tossup.

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