Hi. Welcome to On Politics, your guide to the day in national politics. I’m Thomas Kaplan, and I cover Elizabeth Warren on the campaign trail.
I’m filling in for Nick Corasaniti this week for our Tuesday newsletter, which covers all things media and messaging.
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In the third quarter of Iowa State’s football game against Oklahoma State on Saturday, television viewers came across an unfamiliar sight: a commercial for Elizabeth Warren.
Until that moment, Ms. Warren’s presidential campaign had been conspicuously absent from the airwaves in the Democratic primary race — even as rivals with far less money to spend have bought television ads.
The ad that appeared on Saturday was the first time the Warren campaign has aired a commercial in the 2020 race, her campaign confirmed.
In the minute-long ad, Ms. Warren, a senator from Massachusetts, begins by telling the story of her upbringing in Oklahoma, illustrated with old photos and home video. Then she talks about a central theme of her campaign: the idea that the government “works for the rich and the powerful, and leaves everyone else behind,” which Ms. Warren says amounts to corruption. The ad concludes with footage from the big rally Ms. Warren held in Washington Square Park in New York in September.
The ad, which aired on the cable sports network FS1, cost $27,000, according to Advertising Analytics, a media-tracking company.
That is a drop in the bucket for the Warren campaign, which entered October with $25.7 million in cash on hand, more than any Democratic campaign aside from that of Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont.
It is also a tiny amount compared with what the Warren campaign has spent on digital advertising: more than $6 million in total on Facebook and Google, according to data from those companies.
Ms. Warren speaks somewhat contemptuously about television ads, preferring instead to talk about her desire to build a “grass-roots movement” that would pay off in November 2020.
“We can’t have a model of, scoop up a bunch of money, run a bunch of TV ads at the last minute and then count on all of the folks to show up,” she said earlier this year.
Still, Ms. Warren is planning to spend millions on television advertising as time goes on. In September, her team announced what it described as an eight-figure advertising campaign in the first four states to vote — Iowa, New Hampshire, Nevada and South Carolina — that would include digital and television ads. Her campaign is set to air commercials in Iowa next week, according to Advertising Analytics, and it has reserved millions of dollars of television ads in those four states in early 2020.
The Warren campaign decided to produce its television ads in-house “rather than adopt the consultant-driven approach of other campaigns (and the big commissions and fees that come along with it),” her campaign manager, Roger Lau, wrote in a memo in September announcing the eight-figure ad campaign. Her team unveiled three ads at the time, including the 60-second spot that was shown on Saturday.
Ms. Warren visited Iowa State’s campus in Ames for a town hall event last week and will return to Iowa on Friday for a four-day visit.
She is hoping she fares better in the caucuses than the school’s football team fared on Saturday: They entered the game as the favorite but ended up losing to Oklahoma State, 34-27.
Yesterday, our colleague Lisa Lerer shared her politically themed Halloween costume. Reminder: Send us pictures of your best political costumes this year. Bonus points if you include dogs or children.
Email us at onpolitics@nytimes.com. Please include your name and where you live, and you could be featured in an upcoming edition of the newsletter.
Trump’s al-Baghdadi Ad Campaign
President Trump’s re-election campaign has moved quickly to highlight the death of Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the leader of the Islamic State, in its advertising.
On Sunday morning, Mr. Trump announced that Mr. al-Baghdadi had died in a raid in Syria. On Monday, his campaign began running Facebook ads about Mr. al-Baghdadi’s death, according to the company’s database of political ads.
Some of the ads said, “President Trump has brought the #1 terrorist leader to justice. He is KEEPING AMERICA SAFE.” Others cited “the fierce leadership of our Commander-in-Chief.”
Mr. Trump’s re-election effort has poured money into Facebook advertising. Some of its ads about Mr. al-Baghdadi’s death sought to collect campaign donations.
Others were intended to grow its list of possible supporters. They asked people to fill out an “Official Job Performance Poll” that included one question: “How would you rate President Trump’s recent job performance?”
Crucially, the so-called poll asked people to provide their name, email address, ZIP code and cellphone number — allowing the Trump campaign to reach out to them in the future to solicit campaign donations.
Warren’s Corporate Clients
Our colleague Stephanie Saul just published a big story about Elizabeth Warren’s legal work defending corporations in bankruptcy cases while she was a law professor.
Here’s the story behind the story, from Stephanie:
Like most reporters, I’ve spent a considerable amount of time in courthouses, covering big criminal cases and multimillion-dollar civil disputes. Over the years, I’ve become familiar with the lingo lawyers and judges use, and I thought I had a fair understanding of how the legal system worked. In all my trips to courthouses, though, I had never drilled into the arcana of bankruptcy. Until this year.
Enter Elizabeth Warren, a onetime bankruptcy professor turned senator and presidential candidate. In May, Ms. Warren released a list of legal cases she had handled on the side while working as a professor. As part of our jobs as political reporters, we look deeply into the backgrounds of candidates. Many of these stories run under our series called “The Long Run.” The job of looking into Ms. Warren’s legal work fell to me, a nonlawyer.
The cases presented an apparent contradiction. Ms. Warren is a progressive who frequently criticizes the behavior of corporations, but had advised big companies like LTV Steel and Dow Chemical. She is a proponent of the Green New Deal, but had represented utilities that generated power using fossil fuels, and had gone to bat for a company that did not want to pay for cleaning up a Superfund site it left behind. Was Ms. Warren a hypocrite, as some of her opponents had suggested, or was something else in play?
My reporting for this story, which involved reading Ms. Warren’s cases and contacting other lawyers involved, revealed that the answer lay in Ms. Warren’s devotion to the bankruptcy system. Even as she fought on behalf of corporate clients, experts told me, she was also working to preserve the bankruptcy process itself.
Here’s my article on Ms. Warren’s bankruptcy work for big corporations.
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