Complete Story
08/24/2016
Ad spending for presidential race down 60%, concerning broadcasters
Spending on political advertising during the U.S. presidential election has dropped 60 percent from 2012, a troubling sign for local TV broadcasters that were counting on a windfall.
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, according to an analysis by Ken Goldstein, a Bloomberg Politics polling and advertising analyst. That hurts station owners like Sinclair Broadcast Group Inc., Tegna Inc., and Tribune Media Co., Goldstein said.
Spending is down in part because Trump’s campaign has relied instead on getting his message across in a steady stream of media interviews and tweets. There also hasn’t been as much spending by Republican outside groups, such as political action committees, as there was in 2012, Goldstein said. On the Democratic side, the primary season went longer this year than four years ago as Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders battled into early summer.
“It delayed the start of general election advertising in battleground states where the real money is,” said Goldstein, who is also a politics professor at University of San Francisco.
