Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign will begin airing ads in Arizona on Friday, multiple Clinton aides tell CNN, a move that comes hours after Donald Trump said “there will be no amnesty” in a fiery immigration speech that Clinton aides dubbed “his darkest speech yet.”
Role Models, an ad that features kids watching Trump make some of his more salacious comments, will begin airing on Friday as part of the six-figure ad buy, the aides said.
A Democrat presidential candidate has only won Arizona once in the last ten elections — Bill Clinton won the state in 1996 — but Clinton’s top campaign aides believe that Trump’s strategy to stay on the right on immigration and not moderate opens a lane for them to possibly win the state if a higher than average number of Latinos turn out.
The ad buy comes weeks after Clinton’s campaign decided to expand their political and organizing operations into Arizona, telling state Democratic leaders that they planned to invest six figures in a ground operation in the state. Clinton currently has two offices in Arizona.
Clinton’s investment states like Arizona and Georgia — another state the campaign pledged to spend more on organizing — is less about a sure-fire belief that Clinton will win them, but rather to expand the battleground map and make Trump fight hard for those two red states.
The hope within Clinton’s inner circle is that their talk of putting the states in plan will force the Trump campaign to consume valuable time and money it could be devoting in more solidly swing states like Ohio, North Carolina and Florida. And if Clinton is within striking distance in Arizona, Trump already has a narrow path to the 270 electoral votes needed to win.
While Clinton world is making this foray into the two states, Priorities USA, her top dollar super PAC, maintains that it has no plans to spend in Arizona.
The group announced on Wednesday a plan to work with three Latino organizing groups to air $3 million worth of ads in Florida and Nevada aimed at turning out Latino voters. Arizona was not on their list of planned states.
