Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump are facing off Tuesday night in their first Presidential Debate, but the two candidates have already been jockeying for America’s attention for weeks now, and it appears that Harris is in the lead.
Despite entering the presidential race more than seven months into the year, just over 100 days before Election Day, Harris has seen her TV ad campaign skyrocket, outpacing Trump by a significant amount, according to data from Samba TV.
Since beginning her ad campaign in July, Harris ads have reached 44.4M U.S. households at an average frequency of 15.7, Samba says. That’s 41% higher than the 31.4M U.S. households that Trump’s ads have graced with a frequency of 13.9 during that time.
(Frequency indicates the number of times that a user or household will interact with an ad over a specific period of time and, in this case, Samba is measuring the entire stretch of time since Harris launched her campaign in July. So, on average, each of those 44.4M households have interacted with a Harris ad 15.7 times in that time frame.)
Throughout the entire year, Trump ads have reached 34.8M U.S. households, Samba says, meaning that Harris has still surpassed her opponent by 28% in ad reach despite the fact that she didn’t launch a TV ad campaign until about seven weeks ago.
Interestingly, Samba also points out that 90% of Trump’s ad reach has occurred in the weeks since Harris joined the race.
However, neither candidate is doing particularly well with minority groups, as both are overindexing among white audiences and underindexing among Hispanic and Asian households.
According to Samba, Harris is underindexing in Hispanic households by 23%, Trump by 32%.
Naturally, both candidates have turned their attention to the swing states — which Samba considers to be AZ, GA, MI, NC, NV, PA, WI — with Harris’ ads reaching 65% of households in those seven states and Trump ads reaching 62%.
Harris’ lowest ad reach among the swing states is North Carolina and Georgia, where her ads have permeated 57% and 61% of households, respectively. Trump is also struggling a tad in the same states, reaching 59% of households in Georgia and 62% in North Carolina.
By comparison, Harris ads reached an average of 32% of households across the other 43 states, and Trump ads reached 19% of households.
Samba TV doesn’t measure mobile, however, their sample includes a panel of 3M terrestrial TVs, weighted to the U.S. Census. By contrast, Samba TV’s panel is nearly 100x larger than Nielsen’s household footprint of 45K homes.
The entire nation will get the opportunity to see both candidates take a position in Tuesday night’s debate on ABC. Despite the ongoing carriage dispute between Disney and DirecTV that makes ABC unavailable to the latter’s customers, the event is being simulcast on CBS, NBC, MSNBC, CNN, Fox News, the BBC, and C-Span. The debate will also be live streamed on Hulu.
