I initially started writing this blog on Tuesday (we’ll certainly remember, remember, this 5th of November). Currently living in America (although not for much longer – I’m one of the lucky ones) and a TV scholar, I watched the television advertising campaign for the presidential race with equal parts fascination and horror.
I am sure that, across the globe, everyone is still reeling from the shock of the results.
Although we are aware that gender politics in the US are truly awful and people have compared the current political climate to that of The Handmaid’s Tale, in the run up to the election I was silly enough to allow myself a modicum of hope. I didn’t want to be a harbinger of doom and surely a little bit of hope never hurt anyone. Not true, if I had stayed with my original prediction, the verdict may have been easier to accept (I doubt it). To be sure, like many others, I knew that the majority of American people are still not ready for a female president, let alone a mixed-race woman, and if Hillary Clinton could not win in 2016, Harris didn’t stand a chance in 2024.
And yet, from this side of the world, results aside, presidential campaigns are a strangely compelling phenomenon – especially for a Brit that cannot vote. The gloves have been well and truly removed on both sides of the political spectrum. In fact, according to the television news, this was a build up to an historical election like no other. Even bearing in mind the Biden/Trump campaign; coverage of Trump/Vance and Harris/Walz were off the scale. Indeed, this campaign has proved that politics and television are as intertwined as ever they have been since the Nixon/Kennedy debate back in 1960.
With the marriage of TV and politics, political advertising and scaremongering enjoys a long history. Just see, for example, this advert as part of the Lyndon Johnson campaign from 1964 (only 4 years after the Nixon/Kennedy debate):
And this 1968 one from the Nixon/Humphrey/Wallace presidential race.
Television ad campaigns are still as much a part of the presidential race as ever they were. But were they ever this costly? By the time you read this blog, over $16 billion will have been spent on election campaign ads, with nearly $1 billion spent in the last week alone. Enough to feed goodness knows how many starving people, aid the clear up of at least the two latest climate disasters – two hurricanes in Florida, one that ended up in Asheville – and raise countless American families above the poverty line.
Nobody can think that this is reasonable or, in Harris’ camp at least, value for money.
In August Kamala Harris announced that the democrats planned to spend $370 million on ads with the biggest ad of the election (or indeed ever) being the massive projection onto the sphere at Las Vegas:
Estimated to cost $650,000 per week, the ad ran from before the rally in Las Vegas on Thursday 31st October and attempted to appeal to the swing state Nevada which, of course, hosts the gambling centre of America.
Fat lot of good that did with Trump winning with 51.7% of the votes and Harris coming in with a 46.6% share.
One of the main differences discernable in this campaign is how it has been split along gender lines. See, for example, this ad for Kamala Harris, with a voiceover by Julia Roberts:
And the final closing ad in the Harris campaign which appeals to a more pacifist sensibility.
It would be remiss of me not to mention the shameful preponderance of anti-trans adverts that have run over the past weeks and months which, according to PBS, make up 41% of the $95 million spent by the Trump camp.
I’m just going to leave you with an advertising campaign that literally saw me gasping in shock. A scaremongering ad that would never make it onto British TV and one paid for by Psychopac, a team of psychologists and mental health experts who thought the danger of another Trump term large enough to take out this print ad in The New York Times as well as running on CNN, NBC’s Meet the Press and local cable channels including the fiercely Republican home state of Trump – West Palm Beach, Florida.
Even with this, America now has a new President that won the vote by espousing hatred, toxic masculinity and racism. Let’s face it, a Trump presidency will endanger the globe through his refusal to believe in climate change even while America suffers drought and wildfires, do further harm to women’s reproductive rights (don’t worry, Trump will protect us, like it or not) and through ignoring the voices of half of the country. In addition, if Trump does go through with his planned mass deportation of undocumented migrants, he would do well to remember that these people work for minimum wage, pay their taxes and social security like everyone else, and, without their labour, the country will be poorer both economically and culturally.
You couldn’t make it up, could you?
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KIM AKASS is Professor of Radio, Television and Film at Rowan University with a planned exit strategy from Trump’s America. She has co-edited and contributed to several books in the Reading Contemporary Television Series (Bloomsbury Academic formerly I.B. Tauris), is one of the founding editors of the television journal Critical Studies in Television: The International Journal of Television Studies (SAGE), managing editor of the website CSTonline as well as (with McCabe) series editor of the ‘Reading Contemporary Television’ (Bloomsbury). Her book Mothers on American Television: From Here to Maternity was published by Manchester University Press in 2023.
