On Sunday morning, NBC News’s Mark Murray shared numbers on ad spending by Trump and Clinton. In June 2012, the Romney campaign and PACs supporting it spent about $38 million on ads in battleground states — a bit behind the $44.6 million spent by Obama and his allies.

This June? Trump is getting skunked.

In their look at the 2012 election, our John Sides and UCLA’s Lynn Vavreck found that ads made a difference in the race when the balance was lopsided, as it is now. They also found that the presence of staff on the ground made a slight difference in the margin for a candidate in that region. (Without his field operation, they estimate, Obama probably would have lost Florida.) It’s very early; Sides and Vavreck also found that ads right before the election made the biggest difference.

The current gap in ad spending exists because Trump can’t or won’t spend money on ads, just as he can’t or won’t spend money on staff. He will probably trail Clinton in fundraising even if he were to focus on it, and he has said in the past that he didn’t need to spend because he got so much free media.