by Chris White
Former Vice President Joe Biden’s campaign poured more than $1 million into Facebook ads in one day skewering President Donald Trump for fanning the flames of hatred amid protests over police brutality, an archive of ad spending showed.
The presumptive Democratic nominee spent roughly the same amount of money in less than a week on Facebook as he did throughout the past year of his campaign, The New York Times reported Monday.
Biden spent $1.6 million on June 4, tripling that of Trump’s one-day record, according to TheNYT. The Daily Caller News Foundation confirmed the report through Facebook’s ad archive.
Biden’s campaign’s ads, which ask people to sign a petition “condemning” the president, suggest Trump is fanning the “flames of white supremacy, hatred and violence.” More than 1.2 million people signed the petition as of press time.
The ads are running nationally and are designed to collect the names, emails and zip codes of prospective voters and supporters, TheNYT reported.
Biden’s campaign is rolling out the ads amid nationwide demonstrations against the death of George Floyd, a 46-year-old black man who died May 25 after a Minneapolis police officer knelt on his neck for nearly nine minutes, video of the incident showed. The officer, Derek Chauvin, was immediately fired after the incident and faces second-degree murder and manslaughter charges.
Democratic operatives said the former vice president is hitting the right points at a crucial moment.
“This is a seminal moment,” Jason Rosenbaum, a top digital strategist on Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign, told The NYT. Spending sprees of the type Biden is putting together are almost always an “indication that grass-roots donors are donating money at extremely high levels.”
The increase in racial tension is hurting the president’s re-election chances, polls show.
An NPR/PBS NewsHour/Marist poll, published on June 5, showed that nearly 67% of participants believe Trump has mostly increased racial tensions, while only 18% of people in the poll suggested he’s decreased tensions. A separate poll by CNN, published Monday, showed that 31% of people surveyed approve of Trump’s handling of racial issues while 63% said Biden would handle the issues more effectively.
Critics are also lashing out at the president over his response to the coronavirus pandemic, which originated in China before spreading to the United States, where it has killed a reported 110,000 people. Officials across the country tried slowing the virus through stay-at-home orders, which subsequently resulted in tens of millions of lost jobs.
Neither the Trump campaign nor Biden campaign have responded to the DCNF’s request for comment addressing the ads.
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Chris White is a reporter for the Daily Caller News Foundation.
Photo “Joe Biden” by Gage Skidmore. CC BY-SA 2.0.
