Conservative PAC defends the effectiveness of its Trump attack ads

A conservative political action committee associated with the influential Club for Growth is defending its efforts to poach support from former President Donald Trump’s 2024 campaign.

“The data shows we can and did move the needle,” Win It Back PAC President David McIntosh, also the president of Club for Growth, said in a Friday statement.

FOOD STAMPS: DIRECT CALIFORNIA SNAP PAYMENT WORTH UP TO $1,691 TO BE SENT IN THREE DAYS

The New York Times reported Thursday on a memo to donors, writing that WIB found “little is working” in advertisements against Trump.

Trump senior adviser Jason Miller reacted to the report on social media, suggesting the ad campaigns were a waste of money. “All that money could be going to help defeat Joe Biden. They’re literally lighting the donor money on fire,” he wrote.

The PAC believes the report’s framing missed the mark and doesn’t capture what the data it collected show. In the donor memo, WIB summarizes that in Iowa, “we successfully damaged President Trump’s standing in our treatment markets on every key metric we tracked compared to the shifts that occurred in the control markets.”

It highlighted significant decreases in positive views of Trump across several metrics in the state. Favorable views of Trump dropped a net 12 percentage points, as did the share of Iowans “definitely” considering voting for the former president, according to the group. Further, the percentage of people who said Trump was both “a good president” and the best candidate for the GOP in 2024 fell 13 points. WIB also noted that his stature in a primary matchup and against Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-FL) weakened.

Despite this movement, the threat posed to the former president is not significant, it said, as no other candidate has been able to consolidate the non-Trump vote.

The report from the New York Times focused on the PAC’s findings regarding the types of advertisements that are effective and ineffective. The memo did indicate that efforts to undermine Trump through ads focused on specific topics proved futile. When ads attempted to shift support away from Trump through ads focused on specific topics, “they find a way to rationalize and dismiss it.”

WIB told donors, “The best-performing ads include non-scripted Republicans sharing reservations in their own words that touch on” broadly acceptable messaging, such as “sharing concerns about his ability to beat President Biden, expressions of Trump fatigue due to the distractions he creates and the polarization of the country, as well as his pattern of attacking conservative leaders for self-interested reasons.”

CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM THE WASHINGTON EXAMINER

When crafting ads, “it is essential to disarm the viewer at the opening of the ad by establishing that the person being interviewed on camera is a Republican who previously supported President Trump; otherwise, the viewer will automatically put their guard up,” according to the memo.

WIB plans to continue its research and attempts to lower Trump’s standing in the primary and hopes to “maximize an alternative candidate’s ballot share when the field begins to consolidate.”