Clinton off to fast start with Iowa TV ads

Hillary Clinton has gotten out of the blocks with television ads in Iowa, and so far, rival Donald Trump has yet to respond.

Much like 2012, when President Barack Obama beat Mitt Romney to the airwaves with ads aimed at influencing the public's opinion about the Republican presidential nominee, Clinton, too, has beaten the presumptive Republican nominee to television first.

It's not clear how big her lead is at this point. The Clinton camp has said only that it's begun airing an 'eight-figure” television buy in eight states, including Iowa. But the pro-Clinton Super PAC Priorities USA said that as of the end of last week, it already had spent $1.2 million in Iowa.

It's still early in the 2016 general election campaign. By about this time in 2012, the Obama camp had spent more than $800,000 on television ads in the Quad Cities alone, with pro-Romney forces pitching in another $400,000-plus.

Still, that Trump has not responded yet will give an advantage to Clinton down the road, said Brad Anderson, who directed Obama's campaign in Iowa in 2012.

'A month from now, you are going to see the results of these ads,” he said. Clinton's ads began airing about two weeks ago.

Iowa is expected to be a battleground state. A Public Policy Polling poll, released Tuesday, said Clinton holds a narrow lead over Trump in Iowa, 41 percent to 39 percent. That's virtually the same as the 3-point lead she held in a poll the group conducted before the Clinton campaign began airing its ads but after the Super PAC spots began to run.

Republican Party leaders in Iowa don't appear to be worried about Clinton's head start on the air. Asked about it last week, Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, dismissed the idea there was any reason to be concerned.

He said he hadn't spoken with Trump, but his impression is that he will rely on allied groups to do the work that traditionally has fallen to campaigns.

'I think he's going to have the RNC be the superstructure of his campaign,” he said.

To what extent the ads will affect the electorate is not clear yet. The 2016 election cycle has sparked a debate over whether television ads will carry the same clout they have in the past. In the primary campaign, after all, Trump was able to leverage massive amounts of free news media coverage and withstand millions of dollars of negative ads thrown at him by rivals and their allies.

Brian Dumas, a media buyer and political consultant for Davenport-based Victory Enterprises Inc., which works for Republican candidates, said Trump has rewritten many of the rules.

'I just think he breaks all the standard norms,” Dumas said.

He added that although Trump won't be able to sustain millions of dollars of television ads without responding, this also is a different election cycle in that the two major party candidates already are well known to the electorate.

A number of polls say that Clinton and Trump are seen in a negative light by a majority of voters, although Trump's unfavorable ratings are worse than Clinton's. And the Public Policy Polling survey in Iowa said only a fraction of voters didn't have an opinion about either of the candidates.

Nonetheless, Dianne Bystrom, director of the Carrie Chapman Catt Center for Women and Politics at Iowa State University, said ads can move people's opinions about individuals, even if they are already well known. She notes that Clinton's early ads, for the most part, are highlighting her work on progressive issues, the kind of biographical spots that usually are aired by candidates who aren't well known.

'What she's trying to say is, ‘Don't believe everything you know about me,'” Bystrom said.

Donna Hoffman, the head of the political science department at the University of Northern Iowa, also noted that while Trump has benefited from media coverage, it was with a primary electorate, not a wider general election audience.

'The asymmetric aspect of ads in the state at this point is unusual, and we don't have a lot to compare it to historically in terms of potential impact,” Hoffman said in an email. 'That said, Trump benefited enormously from free media during the nomination campaign. While I think that is unlikely to continue at the same pace in the general election, this cycle has proven to be very unusual - and hard to predict.”