Polling for Ad Revenue: The 2016 Media Horse Race Creation

Recent polling shows Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton neck and neck in the race for the presidency. One poll even showed the Republican nominee with a one point lead over his rival — previously believed impossible given the billionaire’s gift for self-sabotage.

So what’s going on here?

The answer may be the simplest of reasons: money.

The data comes from the latest Reuters poll.

Reuters:

Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump has pulled into an effective tie with Democratic rival Hillary Clinton, erasing a substantial deficit as he consolidated support among his party’s likely voters in recent weeks, according to the latest Reuters/Ipsos national tracking poll released Friday.

The article goes on to explain how the tie is based on national numbers drawn from a pool of just over 1800 national voters. But it’s not until about halfway down the page that we get to the heart of the matter; the reason that these poll numbers are meaningless:

Voters don’t elect the American president directly, of course, but through the Electoral College, an assembly representing each of the 50 states and the District of Columbia based on the number of legislators they have in Congress. As of last Friday, the separate Reuters/Ipsos States of the Nation polling project estimated Clinton was on track to win the Electoral College, by about 332 votes to 206.

This is what’s called a “nut graf” in journalism. The term describes the paragraph of an article that distills the information presented to its most important point. Here, that important point is that even with a tentative lead over Clinton nationally, Trump has no chance of winning as things stand now.

Why was the nut graf buried? Simple. As I said above, this is all about money.

The expected result of this election is a Clinton blowout. It’s not a new concept. Everyone knew when they looked at the field of candidates in late 2015 that the Republicans had an even more difficult road to hoe than usual to get the necessary votes in a presidential election year.

But that result was complicated by the ascendancy of Donald Trump. Trump’s candidacy has been historic — he is by far the most unpopular candidate for president in history (number two on that list? Hillary Clinton).

Trump’s racist rhetoric and general bombasticity has led to him being considered a joke in political circles. Further, most Republican donors have avoided Trump, preferring to come back in four years to try with a more palatable candidate. For now, though, advertising revenue is down. It’s hard to generate the feeling of a need to blast the airwaves with campaign ads when polls like this one showing Clinton up by ten points come out.

The writing’s on the wall. Unless it seems like it’ll be a close race this year, there’s just no point for either side to run an aggressive ad campaign.

Trade journals are already putting that information out.

LA Times, April 14:

“If you’re a TV station group owner and you have a lot of competitive House and Senate races in your state, then you’re OK,” Wilner said. “If you’re an owner who has
a lot of stations that have nothing else going on but the presidential race, you’re worried.”

The uncertainty over how much Trump will spend on advertising comes with the billionaire’s ability to lead in the Republican delegate count largely through his skills as a TV personality to get free airtime.

Bloomberg News, August 18:

Spending on political advertising during the U.S. presidential election has dropped 60 percent from 2012…

Since late April, when Donald Trump effectively secured the Republican nomination, $146 million has been spent in the presidential race by all sponsors, compared with $373 million over the same period in 2012

TVWatch, August 22:

TV stations had been expected to reap record political advertising revenue this year — around $4 billion — with overall local TV advertising hitting $21.9 billion. But many say this early estimate included traditional and usual TV media buys made by both presidential candidates.

Bloomberg News, September 1:

In another sign of the unusual nature of this election year, slightly more has been spent thus far on general-election broadcast television ads targeting U.S. Senate contests than on those for the White House race….

In a normal election cycle, ad spending on the presidential race would typically exceed Senate totals. Through the first eight months of 2012, for example, $350 million had been spent on general-election ads for the presidential race, CMAG data shows, while just $70 million had been spent on 22 Senate races. In 2008, there had been $127 million in general-election presidential broadcast advertising by this point, compared to $20 million for 15 Senate races.

That’s money that the media outlets expected disappearing.

That’s real revenue that doesn’t exist anymore.

What would you do if you were in that situation? Might you, for example, publish articles promoting the findings of a single poll that shows Trump ahead of Clinton by one point — well within the margin of error — and bury the actual lede showing he has no chance? Because that would be a good tactic to drum up concerns and hopefully spur the campaigns to spend more money on ads.

The media’s coverage of politics makes a lot more sense when you look at it as a business.

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