IF YOU’VE SPENT A LOT OF TIME watching the NFL, college football or Dancing with the stars over the past week, or if you’re just an average political obsessive, you’ve probably noticed Donald Trump’s taxpayer-funded ads.
They are billed as “public service announcements” and one of the spots features excerpts from a speech Trump gave at one of his 2024 campaign rallies. The speech goes like this:
With you on my side, we will take down the deep state. We will expel the warmongers from our government. We will drive out the globalists. We will drive out the communists, the Marxists and the fascists. We will get rid of the sick political class that hates our country. We will eliminate the fake media and free America from these villains once and for all.
Since the ads started airing, it’s become clear that people hate the idea of the government using taxpayer dollars to run them. And I mean, they Really I hate it.
A recent Reuters/Ipsos poll found that people oppose “using taxpayer dollars to fund election-related television ads featuring the president or members of his cabinet” by a margin of 5 percent. 86-9.
What is less clear is whether the ads themselves are effective. After all, voters still claim to hate political ads. Even when campaign ads are truly effective, voters almost never admit to liking, trusting, or being influenced by them. And yet they work. But is it Trump’s?
To find out, we convened a group of Florida voters who supported Trump in 2024 but now disapprove of his job performance — the very voters he needs to win back — and showed them the ad. What we saw was a whole new level of revulsion. In fact, we couldn’t even answer the question.
“If you’ve watched the NFL or college football, you might have seen a little bit of this,” the focus group moderator began. They were immediately interrupted.
“Oh my God,” Ramiro, 58, of Miami interjected, clearly knowing what was coming.
Then we ran the ad.
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