Trump campaign ad knocks Biden’s ‘shut it down’ economy comment

The Trump campaign got back into the TV ad wars Tuesday after ceding the airwaves to Joseph R. Biden in recent weeks, hitting the Democratic challenger for threatening to bring the president’s “great American comeback” to a screeching halt by again shutting down the economy.

The ad blitz across battleground states was a marked shift in strategy after President Trump managed to cut into Mr. Biden’s lead in recent polling despite going comparatively dark on TV in the run-up to Labor Day.

“Our spending on advertising has been nimble and agile based on the early voting and absentee calendar,” said Trump campaign manager Bill Stepien.

The campaign’s new ad, set to air this week in North Carolina, Florida, Georgia, Minnesota, Wisconsin and Michigan, plays off Mr. Biden’s recent statement that he’d be willing to shut the economy back down if scientists said it was necessary to slow the spread of the coronavirus.

“Why would we ever let Biden kill countless American businesses, jobs and our economic future?” the ad says.

The Trump campaign also released a new radio ad featuring former NFL player Herschel Walker and Georgia state Rep. Vernon Jones talking up Mr. Trump’s efforts on behalf of Black Americans.

The Biden campaign released a pair of ads on Tuesday, part of a $47 million buy.

“This is our chance to put the darkness of the past four years behind us,” one 60-second spot says, echoing a theme from Mr. Biden’s Democratic National Convention speech.

The other slams the president’s push to cut payroll taxes as detrimental to Social Security.

There’s no question that Mr. Biden is outpacing Mr. Trump on the airwaves, though the president’s team appears to be ramping up.

The Trump campaign has pre-booked over $65 million in television ads in September and about $80 million in October, according to the firm Advertising Analytics.

That marks a jump from the final weeks in August when the campaign invested about $5 million.

Mr. Biden, meanwhile, invested more than $30 million in ads over the closing weeks of August.

The Democratic presidential nominee has pre-booked about $70 million in television ads for September.

Mr. Stepien said some targets of Mr. Biden’s deluge are telling.

“These are all places that you don’t spend money — Colorado, New Hampshire, Nevada, Virginia, Minnesota — if you don’t think the race is tight,” he said.

Many Americans don’t start tuning into the presidential race until after Labor Day.

But Mitt Romney suffered from his lagging presence on the airwaves in 2012, allowing then-President Obama to define the Republican nominee as an out-of-touch plutocrat before the fall campaign got underway.

Mr. Trump appears to have fared better in his relative absence from the airwaves, using the bully pulpit to drive the news and keep his voice front and center on the national stage.

Mr. Biden has been able to dominate the airwaves thanks to a nearly $365 million haul the campaign and the Democratic National Committee raised in August, which is believed to be a single-month record for any presidential campaign.

Guy Cecil, who chairs the pro-Democratic super PAC Priorities USA, said the Biden campaign’s windfall has allowed his group to pivot away from TV.

“In large part because the Biden campaign has been so successful at raising money, it has allowed us to move resources into the vote-by-mail and early vote program,” Mr. Cecil said. “We don’t have to cover as much territory on television as we did in previous elections.”

Mr. Trump and the Republicans have not yet released their August fundraising totals, though the president is believed to have raised about $76 million during the four-day Republican National Convention, which ran from Aug. 24-27.

Mr. Trump said on Tuesday that he would start pouring some of his sizable personal wealth into the campaign if he felt the need to do so.

“We don’t, because we have much more money than we had last time going into the last two months,” he said while traveling to Florida, a critical battleground state.

The comments came after The New York Times published a story suggesting that the president’s campaign squandered what had been a sizable financial edge over Mr. Biden earlier this year with questionable spending.