For Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, and their team, their nominating convention is over, and the rest of the race is a 10-week sprint to the finish line. With this in mind, I was curious to see what the Democratic ticket’s first message would be as the election enters its final phase.
The Columbus Dispatch answered the question today.
Joe Biden’s campaign is turning to Ohio for one of its first TV ads coming out of last week’s Democratic National Convention, targeting President Donald Trump’s call for a boycott of Akron-based Goodyear Tire & Rubber Co. The commercial’s message is straightforward: “A company with a 122-year history in Akron, Ohio; thousands of American workers, and competitors all over the world; and a sitting president, who’s spinning out of control, would risk American jobs to try to save his own.”
The article added that a similar ad will air in North Carolina, which isn’t a coincidence: Goodyear has a manufacturing plant near Fayetteville. (The ad airing in Ohio is online here.)
The Biden campaign’s message coincides with a related ad from the Lincoln Project, led by anti-Trump Republicans, which is also reminding voters in Ohio about Trump’s call for a Goodyear boycott.
Trump “talks a good game, but he’s not on our side,” a narrator in the Lincoln Project ad tells viewers. “Never has been. Never will be.”
For those who may need a refresher, a local station in Kansas recently ran a report about a Goodyear diversity training slideshow in which workers were told to avoid attire that says, among other things, “Make America Great Again.” The company distanced itself from the image, explaining in a statement that “the visual in question was not created or distributed by Goodyear corporate, nor was it part of a diversity training.”
Nevertheless, Trump last week used Twitter to publicly call on his followers to boycott the American company, and as part of the same tweet, the president criticized the quality of Goodyear tires.
A day later, the president acknowledged during a press briefing that his efforts may cause Goodyear workers to lose their jobs, but he argued it wouldn’t much matter because the employees would “be able to get another good jobs.”
The cavalier attitude about job losses amidst double-digit unemployment seemed bizarre. Evidently, Team Biden intends to make Trump pay a price for it.
Earlier this year, Ohio was not expected to be a 2020 battleground, especially after the Republican ticket carried the state by eight points four years ago. That said, recent polling has shown Biden in a competitive position in the Buckeye State this year, and with the president doing himself no favors, it will apparently be a state worth watching in the fall.
