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Not every Republican loves Donald Trump. Some of them, especially well-heeled donors, actively hate him (because they are still grieving for St. Ronald of Reagan). Some of the big donors are even trying to do something to get rid of Trump. A PAC associated with the Club for Growth, Win It Back, has been working on developing ads to see what works best against Trump. Their modus operandi was to produce ads (of which they have made 40 and counting), then show them to 12 focus groups of Trump voters. Next, the winners were field tested in selected cities in Iowa and South Carolina by running the ads on Fox News and other conservative media. They ran polls before and after the ads, both in cities where the ads ran and cities where they didn't (the control group) to see what effect they had on a larger audience. Win It Back is a pretty serious operation that has spent $6 million so far.
David McIntosh, the president of the Club for Growth, wrote a memo to his donors reporting on the findings so far. As with so much "secret" stuff, the memo leaked out. A reporter for The New York Times, Jonathan Swan (formerly with Axios) snagged a copy and wrote a story about it. That's how it goes.
The main finding is that ads that attempt to take Trump down on the issues all fail. They made ads in which Trump said something and then directly after that clip show Joe Biden saying exactly the same thing, with the implication (sometimes made explicit), that Trump is a far-left liberal, just like Biden. Many ways of trying to undermine Trump's "conservative" credentials all failed. The people in the focus groups just ignored what they saw and said "Oh, it's just Trump. He's like that." None of the policy ads moved the needle at all. His supporters simply don't care what he says or what policies he is for. What they love is his xenophobia, bigotry, and ability to make liberals' blood boil. They don't care about specific policies on anything.
Examples of failed ads focus on the pandemic, vaccines, praise of Anthony Fauci, abortion, his failed wall project, wokeness, and gun control. Trump just rambles all the time, so there is plenty of video of him saying things that conservatives hate, often followed by the exact opposite. So it is not hard to put together a carefully curated video of him saying things that would make Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) give him a big hug. But none of them make Trump's supporters have any doubts about him. And remember, the people running the project are Trump-hating pros who know what they are doing, use a solid methodology, and have all the money they need. None of the policy ads worked.
What is also interesting is that many of the ads Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-FL) has been airing hit the same themes that McIntosh's failed ads do. DeSantis is discovering the hard way that talking about "woke" is useless. Win It Back discovered the same thing using carefully designed controlled experiments in which some people saw the ads, some people didn't, and the before and after polls in both groups were compared. Is it surprising that DeSantis is flailing? What is interesting here is that the big-money people on the right very much believe in the scientific method and know exactly how to run proper experiments. Marketing departments in big companies do this kind of thing all the time.
The ads that worked best were ads going after Trump's character, Trump fatigue, and his harping on 2020, rather than policy ads. His Achilles heel is his personality, style, and character, not his policy positions.
All of the "successful" ads started with the "stars" of the ads saying how much they love Trump, how they were so happy to vote for him twice, or something like that, to establish their bona fides as someone worth listening to. If viewers didn't know this, they would just write them off as Commie pinko liberals and ignore the rest of the ad. All of the actors look like ordinary people you might see every day. They are men, women, young, and old. Here are a few of these ads.
The character ads resulted in a net drop of 10-15 points in Trump's favorability among his supporters measured by various metrics and questions in the before-and-after surveys. The WIB researchers observed a drop off after about three ads. By the time people had been exposed to three ads in consecutive weeks, more of the same didn't have much additional impact.
The memo linked to above has more detail, but the bottom line is that policy ads don't work against Trump because his supporters don't really care about policy, even when he says things they hate. The way to get to them is to show that he is a loser or past his use-by date. Now that this fairly extensive data set is out there, it behooves the Biden campaign to try to reproduce the experiment (just in case McIntosh is trying to ratf**k the Democrats, although a memo to his own donors would be the wrong place to try that). If they come to the same conclusion as Mcintosh, they need to create ads showing Trump as old, feeble, confused, and generally a loser. If they want to go whole hog, they could also create ads in which Trump supporters are talking about him and at the end have them say: "I am a lifelong Republican and could never vote for a Democrat, so I am not going to vote this year." In other words, voter suppression ads. That also helps Democrats win the House and hold the Senate. Or if No Labels picks a Republican as presidential candidate (e.g. Larry Hogan), Biden's ads could encourage dyed-in-the-wool Republicans to vote for the No Labels candidate. (V)