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Clinton more than doubles TV ad spending in final days

Posted at 6:59 PM, Nov 02, 2016
and last updated 2016-11-02 20:59:04-04

By Gregory Wallace

CNN

WASHINGTON (CNN) — Hillary Clinton has money to spend and she’s putting it into TV ads.

Her campaign has more than doubled its ad spending in this final week of the campaign, going from about $14 million to $32.4 million, according to data from Kantar Media/CMAG, a company that tracks political advertising.

Included in the last-minute $18 million influx is nearly $5 million in additional airtime in Florida, a toss-up state that Donald Trump must win to reach the White House.

Clinton is also putting money on the airwaves in blue states, seeking to deny her rival inroads into her so-called blue wall of defense.

At the same time, the Republican National Committee has made its first ad buy in support of Trump, putting up $2.9 million in five states — Florida, Michigan, Nevada, Colorado, New Mexico and Iowa — and a new ad referencing news of a Clinton-related FBI probe.

“Now, the FBI has launched a new investigation. After decades of lies and scandal, her corruption is closing in,” the narrator says, explaining how “pay-to-play politics” made her “filthy rich.”

Clinton’s new reservations follow Trump’s pledge to spend $25 million on advertising this week, although he is about $5 million short of that target. He would need to increase his spending by about $15 million to honor his pledge to spend $100 million on TV from late September through Election Day.

Future45, a GOP super PAC funded by the Adelson and Ricketts families, also plans to spend $10 million on a television campaign in the closing days.

All told, the candidates’ campaigns and outside groups supporting their bids will spend nearly $75 million on TV ads this week.

Clinton’s additional funds grow her reach in several key battlegrounds, such as Ohio, Pennsylvania and North Carolina.

But she is also buying time in blue states in what her campaign described as an effort to block any Trump efforts to expand the electoral map.

For example, Clinton’s campaign is going up in Colorado, where it last advertised in late July, and Virginia, where it last ran ads in early August. She is also running her first ads of the general election in Michigan and New Mexico.

Both campaigns have announced plans to run ads during Game 7 of the World Series Wednesday night.

CNN’s Theodore Schleifer contributed to this report.

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