Just when you thought it was safe to go back to the water….along comes a presidential re-election campaign. In a clever move, PresidentTrump’s campaign will take advantage of the Labor Day holiday and use flyover banner ads in beach areas.

Not just any beach areas, mind you. The campaign is targeting cities that went blue in 2016 in hopes of gathering about 30,000 phone numbers to add to its list of supporters. The cities include Milwaukee, Wisconsin., Erie, Pennsylvania., Cleveland, Virginia Beach, Va., Detroit, and Fort Lauderdale and South Beach, Florida. All of them delivered Hillary Clinton with the majority of their votes. It will cost about $20,000 to do. Planes will fly the banners for a total of 21 hours.

On Labor Day, President Trump’s re-election campaign plans to fly banners urging beachgoers in cities that largely went blue in 2016 to add their phone numbers to the list of supporters the campaign has been cultivating. That list already has contact information for more than 33 million voters or about half of the number of Americans who voted for Mr. Trump in 2016, and campaign manager Brad Parscale expects to have at least 50 million by Election Day.

Trump won these states, except Virginia, but not the cities in the 2016 presidential election. Much to the chagrin of bitter Hillary voters, she lost the electoral college and the election over her neglect of three states in particular – Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania. She concentrated on the urban areas, and won them, but failed to win the rest of the states’ voters. She didn’t even bother to go to Wisconsin at all. Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania have 75 electoral votes altogether.

Including Detroit, a solid Democrat stronghold, in the operation is a show of the level of seriousness the campaign has for going into unfriendly areas.

Detroit backed Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton with 95% of the vote in the 2016 presidential election, while Trump won Michigan by 10,704 votes or two-tenths of a percentage point.

The ads are expected to be towed over the Detroit area after the scheduled conclusion of the annual Labor Day parade — roughly from 11 a.m. to 2 p.m. Monday. Trump made inroads with union households during the 2016 election.

As I wrote Saturday, the Trump campaign is thinking outside the box and using unorthodox advertising to capture the attention of voters. Just as holding big-dollar fundraisers in California during Emmy week in September will take attention away from celebrities patting themselves on the back, flyover banners over the beaches of swing states is a smart move. It’s cheap and will certainly garner attention by the local press. Who doesn’t look up to read the banner when one flies overhead?

The Trump campaign has already targeted these areas with digital advertising.

The Trump campaign has already focused much of its digital advertising on Facebook on the swing states the flyovers are targeting, according to analysis of Facebook ad data by Bully Pulpit Interactive, a Democratic digital firm that tracks spending in the 2020 presidential race. Between March 30 and Aug. 24, the campaign spent the second-most amount—$484,467— on Facebook ads in Florida and the fourth-most—$276,421—in Ohio, followed by $266,853 in Pennsylvania and $211,490 in Michigan.

Flyover banners aren’t the campaign’s most unconventional advertising, either. That title is safe with the campaign’s use of plastic straw sales to raise funds. Remember the hubbub over the Trump straws when some cities began to ban plastic straws in restaurants and other public venues? The campaign is laughing all the way to the bank, having raised about $750,000 from the straw sales.

So, if you are planning to head out to one of these spots for Labor Day and see a plane in the sky with a banner trailing behind it, just wave. Some pilot is working while you are enjoying a day at the beach – a wave is a friendly thing to do. We know the kind of hand gestures that the Trump deranged beach-goers will make.

.@realDonaldTrump is a master of communication and branding, so we’re reaching into our bag of tricks.

It’s a bird, it’s a plane, it’s @TeamTrump!https://t.co/m6X7XP2DYE

— Brad Parscale (@parscale) August 29, 2019