With the political world’s attention focused on the first Democratic debates, candidates and interested parties capitalized on the opportunity to get their message in front of voters via paid media. We saw a variety of the lower-polling democrats seize this moment, but as usual the real story lies with President Trump. Google has not yet released spending disclosures for last week, but it has been widely reported that the Trump campaign bought the Youtube masthead, some of the most highly visible advertising space available. This ad space runs for about $1M for 24 hours of advertising. Not only is this a powerful financial flex from Trump’s campaign, but it also doubles as an earned media play. Trump, along with his “Make America Great Again Committee,” spent $13.6M on Facebook and Google from January 1st-the week of June 16th. But the campaign’s spending has steadily increased over the past two months. Since the first week of May, it has gone from spending $175k per week to $992k the week of June 16th. With what we know of Trump’s Google expenditures during

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