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Former Vice President Joe Biden is launching the first major advertising buy of the general election, targeting states that President Donald Trump won in 2016 and including spending in African-American media.
Biden’s campaign is spending $15 million over five weeks on TV, digital, radio and print ads. The campaign said TV and digital ads are launching in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Michigan, North Carolina, Florida and Arizona, all states that Trump carried four years ago.
The campaign said that beginning Friday, when the U.S. commemorates Juneteenth — a holiday marking the end of slavery — it will make a six-figure investment in African-American print, radio and digital programming in the same six states.
In addition to two English-language ads, the campaign will also run Spanish-language ads in Florida and Arizona.
The ads were first reported by the New York Times. Trump has spent nearly $22.7 million on ads through Monday, the Times reported, citing media-tracking firm Advertising Analytics.
One of the ads uses part of Biden’s speech in Philadelphia that he gave after the killing of George Floyd, an unarmed black man who died while in Minneapolis police custody. “I’ll seek to heal the racial wounds that have long plagued our country, not use them for political gain,” Biden says over images of Trump’s photo-op at St. John’s Church near the White House, for which protesters were cleared from the area.
Trump had been scheduled to host his first campaign rally since the coronavirus hit the U.S. in Tulsa, Okla., on Friday. He rescheduled the event for Saturday after calls to change the original date since it fell on Juneteenth.
See:Trump says he will reschedule 2020 campaign rally in Tulsa that fell on Juneteenth holiday.
The ad-buy announcement follows Monday’s statement from the Biden campaign that it and the Democratic National Committee raised $80.8 million in May, the biggest monthly total to date.
Now read:Joe Biden and DNC report that May was their best fundraising month so far.
