As John Prideaux mentioned in last week’s edition of this newsletter, I had a few days off in Pennsylvania. And you know what that means: I got to watch a ton of political ads. If you live anywhere but a swing state, you’re lucky to catch an occasional campaign ad on some cable news network. But if, like me, you sit in a hotel room in Pittsburgh when the local newscasts are on and flip from station to station to catch the ad breaks, you can watch such advertising pretty much continuously, at least until your wife’s patience runs out. The two main presidential campaigns and the political action committees that support them have already spent more in Pennsylvania—$350m as of September 1st—than they did during the entire campaign of 2020, when Pennsylvania was also up for grabs, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette reported while I was in town.

The commercials from Donald Trump and his allies uniformly attack his opponent, Kamala Harris, as my colleague Adam O’Neal reports in his article this week. Ms Harris, a far less familiar politician, is running more ads introducing herself and outlining her priorities (as I write in this week’s Lexington, her best opportunity to do this will probably be Tuesday’s debate). The old rule of thumb among political ad gurus is that a viewer needs to see a given advert at least ten times to absorb its message; some Pennsylvanians are probably seeing many times that number. “The sheer volume of ads could numb voters, making the air war a draw,” Karl Rove, a veteran Republican operative, wrote on September 4th in the Wall Street Journal.

I’ve engaged in this kind of political-advertising tourism since 1996, and what amazes me is how little the game has changed. Candidates change and occasionally issues do too (though warning that the other guy will wreck social security and Medicare is a hardy quadrennial). But the 30-second political spot follows the same basic template: grainy black-and-white images of the bad guy set to jarring music, alternating with vivid shots of the good guy backed by uplifting tunes. It is a relief to encounter those lower-budget ads for down-ballot candidates, which are more likely to be having some fun. 

While passing through Wilkes-Barre in north-eastern Pennsylvania I caught an ad for Rob Bresnahan, a Republican running for Congress in the 8th district. Wearing a hard hat, he stands in a cherry-picker high above the ground, describing his success running his family’s electric-contracting business (a union shop, he is careful to note). Down on the ground, his two workers take a break as Mr Bresnahan—“Yo!”—fruitlessly summons them back. “I approve this message,” he concludes, taking responsibility for the ad as required by campaign-finance law, “because just like my guys here, I’ll never let you down.” The simile is confusing, but in my book he gets points for whimsy.  

All in all, the ad onslaught is a reminder of one way American campaigns teach voters to disdain politics. What a contrast it makes to visit the museum dedicated to Andy Warhol, who grew up in Pittsburgh, and recall how he delighted in the advertising for products such as Campbell’s soup (which he claimed to eat every day for 20 years). “Pop art is about liking things,” Warhol said. Maybe it’s inevitable that politics is so much about disliking them. Even Warhol made a negative political ad of sorts, a sickly green image of Richard Nixon he sold in 1972 to raise money for George McGovern. 

Do you have an all-time favourite political ad or slogan? Please let me know at jbennet@economist.com.  

Elsewhere in The Economist:

• Democrats reliably win North Carolina’s local races, but fail in presidential votes. Will this time be different?
• Steven Teles, a political scientist, on the three Ps that Kamala Harris should focus on
• America has a huge deficit. Which candidate would make it worse?