Scott’s Struggling Campaign Pulls Millions of Dollars in Ad Buys, in Sign That Field Against Trump May Be Thinning

As Senator Scott’s troubled presidential campaign pulls millions of dollars in ad buys, Republican political groups are sending signals that it’s time for the field of candidates opposing President Trump to start winnowing.In a memo provided to the Washington Post, the co-chairman of the Scott-aligned Trust in the Mission PAC, Rob Collins, told donors that the campaign would be pulling most of its ads from the air. “We aren’t going to waste our money when the electorate isn’t focused or ready for a Trump alternative,” he wrote in the memo.Mr. Scott’s campaign has already spent nearly $40 million on ads in preparation for the Iowa caucuses, but it now looks to be reversing course.“We have done the research. We have studied the focus groups. We have been following Tim on the trail. This electorate is locked up and money spent on mass media isn’t going to change minds until we get a lot closer to voting,” Mr. Collins wrote.The memo comes after months of campaigning by Mr. Scott, who has failed to gain traction and is now polling at about 2 percent nationally, according to FiveThirtyEight’s average of polls. The handicapper’s average has South Carolina’s junior senator polling better in socially conservative Iowa, around 5.5 percent, but still down from his late August high of 12 percent.The move from Mr. Scott’s affiliated PAC comes shortly after another committee backed by the influential Club for Growth, the Win It Back PAC, circulated a memo signaling that it was time for Republicans to consider consolidating whatever anti-Trump votes remain in the party.“While we successfully identified messaging and a series of ads that lowered President Trump’s support across our testing and polls, none of the alternative candidates have consolidated the non-Trump vote yet,” Club for Growth’s president, David McIntosh, wrote in a memo obtained by the Sun.He added, “We plan to continue developing and testing ads to deploy when there are signs of consolidation.”The Win it Back PAC memo describes the results of “12 in-person focus groups and four online randomized controlled experiments” where the group tested the effectiveness of “more than 40 television ads” at affecting support for Mr. Trump.What they found is that “attempts to undermine his conservative credentials on specific issues were ineffective, regardless of setting,” but that messaging focusing on “concerns about his ability to beat President Biden” could be effective.The tests also identified that “expressions of Trump fatigue due to the distractions he creates and the polarization of the country, as well as his pattern of attacking conservative leaders for self-interested reasons,” had some purchase with GOP voters.This messaging from the Club for Growth comes as GOP candidates for president will be forced to confront their standings in the GOP primary ahead of a third debate at the Adrienne Arsht Center for the Performing Arts of Miami-Dade County on November 8.The requirements for the third debate will be stiffer than those for the previous two, with candidates needing at least 4 percent in at least two national polls or one national poll and one state poll conducted after September 1, according to the debate’s co-host, NBC News.Nationally, just five candidates — Mr. Trump, Governor DeSantis, Ambassador Nikki Haley, businessman Vivek Ramaswamy, and Vice President Pence — poll above 4 percent on average, though others might still be able to qualify. Candidates will also need at least 70,000 unique donors to qualify, with at least 200 donors in 20 different states or territories. Seven candidates appeared at the last debate.

Scott’s Struggling Campaign Pulls Millions of Dollars in Ad Buys, in Sign That Field Against Trump May Be Thinning

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