Biden’s ads haven’t been working. Now, he’s trying something new.

President Joe Biden’s odds of reelection may be worse than they look. And they don’t look great.

The 2024 presidential race remains very close. Donald Trump leads Biden by a little less than 1 percentage point in national polls, while the two candidates are virtually tied in Michigan and Wisconsin, according to RealClearPolitics’s polling average. But Trump leads Biden by more than 2 points in polls of Pennsylvania, and by considerably more than that in the Sun Belt battlegrounds of Arizona, Nevada, and Georgia. Meanwhile, Trump’s approval rating is 3.3 points higher than Biden’s, according to FiveThirtyEight’s polling averages.

It’s not surprising, then, that the Economist’s election forecast gives Trump a roughly 70 percent chance of victory in November.

For anyone who doesn’t want an illiberal insurrectionist in the White House, these numbers are concerning enough on their face. But they are even more disconcerting when one considers an underappreciated piece of context: Trump hasn’t even begun to air campaign advertisements, while Biden has been blanketing swing-state airwaves. 

In other words: This is what the 2024 race looks like when the president enjoys a massive advantage on paid propaganda. 

As of late May, the Biden campaign was airing $13.6 million worth of ads, while the Trump campaign had yet to spend a single penny on TV spots, according to the Wesleyan Media Project. 

This does not mean that there are no pro-Trump ads airing in the US. Outside groups supportive of the GOP candidate have bought $8 million in advertising. But even when you factor in such spending, pro-Biden ads have been outnumbering pro-Trump ads by slightly more than two-to-one. 

Critically, there is little reason to think that Democrats can maintain such supremacy on the airwaves through November. Although Biden has enjoyed a fundraising advantage in the campaign’s first months, Trump and the Republican National Committee have closed the gap in recent weeks, not least because the GOP candidate’s criminal conviction triggered an avalanche of contributions to his campaign. The reason that Trump hasn’t spent any money on ads thus far isn’t because he can’t afford them. Rather, it seems that his team is choosing to hold its fire until the election grows closer. 

Therefore, if current polls are accurate, Biden will need to increase his support even as his share of swing-state advertisements declines.

All this helps explain why the president’s team recently decided to change its messaging strategy: Biden’s ads aren’t going to get any more unopposed, but they could conceivably get more effective.

To that end, the president’s campaign has decided to go all in on portraying Trump as a ruthless criminal.

During Trump’s trial for falsifying business records in Manhattan, Biden largely refrained from speaking publicly about his adversary’s legal woes. And the president’s response to Trump’s conviction in late May was understated. Asked by Politico for a response to the verdict, White House counsel spokesperson Ian Sams replied, “We respect the rule of law, and have no additional comment.” Biden himself reportedly dictated this posture, concerned that a more aggressive stance might invite the impression that he was politicizing the Department of Justice. 

But focus groups and internal polling changed the president’s mind, according to Politico. It seems likely that Biden’s persistent deficit to Trump in the polls — despite his dominance on TV — also influenced the change of heart. 

In any case, the Biden campaign’s $50 million June ad buy includes a spot that declares, “In the courtroom, we see Donald Trump for who he is. He’s been convicted of 34 felonies, found liable for sexual assault, and he committed financial fraud.” The ad proceeds to suggest that, while the Republican nominee was busy committing crimes, Biden was “lowering health care costs and making big corporations pay their fair share.” In the ad’s telling, “this election is between a convicted criminal who’s only out for himself and a president who’s fighting for your family.”

This framing appears designed to address the fundamental flaw in past Democratic attacks on Trump’s character: Most swing voters are already convinced that Trump is a bad person but still think he might make a good steward of their interests. This is plausibly why Hillary Clinton’s many character attacks on Trump in 2016 failed to persuade a sufficient number of swing-state voters. 

Specifically, many voters seem to believe that Trump’s indifference to legal and ethical niceties might be an asset, one that enables him to pursue the American people’s interests with all due ruthlessness. Trump has promoted that idea throughout his tenure in Republican politics, declaring at a GOP primary debate in 2016, “My whole life I’ve been greedy, greedy, greedy. I’ve grabbed all the money I could get. I’m so greedy. But now I want to be greedy for the United States.”

A recent New York Times focus group with undecided voters suggested that this sentiment still resonates, with one participant saying that Trump is “the guy who does bad things, who is a bad guy but does them on behalf of the people he represents.”

Thus, portraying Trump as not merely a convicted criminal — but a wildly self-centered one — may be a smart play. And wedding that charge to a bread-and-butter message about Biden’s commitment to taxing the rich and lowering drug prices also seems wise. Debates over Democratic messaging often posit a binary choice between running against Trump and for popular economic policies. Biden’s new ad shows that these options are not mutually exclusive.

There are reasons to suspect that campaign ads might be less potent this election year than in the past, as the major party candidates are extremely well-known commodities this time around. On the other hand, Democrats have developed more sophisticated techniques for testing ads in recent years, and there’s some evidence that their campaign commercials have grown more effective as a result.

Regardless, Biden must hope that his new message about Trump’s criminality packs a punch — because, for now, the president is losing the fight for reelection and his rival hasn’t fully entered the ring.