Gearing up to the year 2020, Americans in general and Arizonans in particular have been beset by political ads on television and online.
I gave up my television in 2003 and thankfully have been spared the television ads for the last few presidential cycles, but I now have a 2-year-old daughter who multi-tasks like her father, equally coloring or playing with toys or stuffed animals while keeping an eye on education programs via streaming services like PBS Kids, or a children’s account on Netflix or Amazon Prime, when she’s not running around outside our house or taking us on walks around our neighborhood hunting for snakes and “have-lina.”
But one can only hear the theme song to “Daniel Tiger’s Neighborhood” or “Into the Unknown” from “Frozen II” so many times before trying to find something else, usually on YouTube.
The algorithms and her sign-in account know she’s too young to understand much of anything adult, yet political campaigns for President Donald Trump, former Vice President Joe Biden, U.S. Sen. Martha McSally and challenger Mark Kelly have such an absurd amount of campaign funds that their spending has extended beyond campaign ads during sports games and prime-time programming to casual videos geared for children.
Campaigns can spend what they want where they want, but if I were a campaign operative trying to reach voters, I would be livid that these services were wasting my candidate’s money showing videos to toddlers.
If campaigns think, “well, their parents see the videos, too,” they clearly have never raised a child.
We parents aren’t paying attention to the stuff on screen; we’re interacting with our kids, putting the Lego fire truck back together, stripping the wrapper off the crayon, or looking for the lost left shoe.
Campaign ads are more irritating than influencing when they bother our kids’ play time and candidates suffer for it.
While campaigns dump these dumb ads on our kids, I’m amazed at how little of campaign dollars are aimed at rural communities like ours in the Verde Valley. Campaigns have been emailing me proud announcements about their ad buys and new advertising campaigns, to which I reply that I have nothing to do with any ads in our newspaper, and we certainly won’t be writing stories about them, then direct them to our Advertising Department and delete their emails.
While some state-level candidates have been trying to reach Verde Valley voters with ads in our newspaper and other small newspapers in the state, Trump, Biden, McSally and Kelly haven’t spent much of anything except on online and television ads, which is a poor use of funding considering the Phoenix television ad market is one of the top five most expensive in the country.
While Trump visited Prescott and Biden passed through Northern Arizona between the Navajo Nation and Phoenix, neither did any real outreach to the 65,000 residents here.
McSally and Kelly haven’t publicly visited the Verde Valley at all this year. Sure, Arizona is a big state, but c’mon, it’s not that big.
The campaigns of Congressional District 1 Rep. Tom O’Halleran and challenger Tiffany Shedd have emailed me floating partisan talking points but neither have really asked for legitimate coverage. Neither have called or emailed our newsroom to discuss policy or ask for a campaign profile story. One of them even lives in the Verde Valley and had requested a meeting late last year, but canceled the day of and never rescheduled.
All this absence of meeting real constituents, real people, tends to indicate what they think of us wee folk and how they’ll interact with all us little people when elected.
Pundits and experts can lament the obscene amount of campaign spending dumped on Americans every four or two years, but much of it is being spent stupidly on toddlers rather than registered voters.
Christopher Fox Graham
Managing Editor
