Priorities is spending a reported $20 million on that ad so far, which means a total onslaught of at least $30 million between it and the Clinton campaign. That’s nearly half as much as Trump’s rivals spent against him through mid-April, around $70 million, according to Kantar Media—and that was over the course of several months. Throughout the primary, Trump’s rivals hesitated to attack him, in part because they believed that he’d burn himself out and didn’t want to alienate his backers. By the time they realized their error, Trump was effectively unstoppable. Some of the biggest spends against Trump instead came from outside conservative groups like the Club for Growth.
That means that Trump is facing a barrage of concentrated negative advertising unlike anything he has faced before. The Priorities ads may already be helping to drive his polling down. His unfavorability has tumbled back to where it was last May, around 70 percent.
One way a candidate can blunt such an attack is to counterattack. But doing that by means other than tweets requires money, which is something Trump is notably short on. As of the last report, Trump’s campaign has $2.4 million cash on hand. As Gabriel Debenedetti points out, that means Clinton’s ad buy is at least four times as large as the figure Trump has in the bank.
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