Daily Times

NEW YORK: Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump collectively spent more than $ 2.5 billion over the past six months to reach the most powerful office in the world.

Centre for Responsive Politics (CRP), a non-partisan organisation, predicted that final price tag of the 2016 White House campaign would hit about $2.65 billion. However, the overall spending is less than 2012 when both Barak Obama and Mitt Romney had spent more or less $2.76.

Every four years, spending in presidential races soars to new heights in the United States.

In the current cycle, the Democratic candidate outsmarted her Republican rival in the fundraising by amassing more than $1.5 billion through direct campaign, the party and Super PACs.

Most of the funds were utilised on TV commercials. However, TV advertising tumbled, if compared to the last election, because Republican candidate had decided to rely more on free media coverage, digital outreach and his own prolific tweeting.

The CRP found that between June 8 and Oct 30 Mr Trump aired more than 68,000 ads to boost his White House ambitions, a striking drop from roughly 182,000 ads that 2012 Republican candidate Mitt Romney had aired.

According to Shelia Krumholz, who heads the CRP, comparing Mr Trump with any other nominee was like comparing apples with oranges.

Major TV networks across America were not ready for that. They were expecting bigger revenue in 2016 presidential cycle than what they earned in 2012. The 2016 election could have been a banner year for political advertising, with a wide-open White House race in which neither a sitting president nor vice president was running for the job.

“Instead of surging to new highs, overall political spending on broadcast TV is likely to be flat,” the USA Today quoted Steve Lanzano, president and CEO of The Television Bureau of Advertising, as saying.

“It’s not like the dollars went away,” he said. Instead, money flowed into ballot initiatives and down-ticket races for the House and Senate, where Republicans are scrambling to retain their majorities.

The paper said that Mrs Clinton and groups aligned with her also have run fewer general-election ads than President Obama and his allies did in 2012. But Team Clinton held a staggering 3-to-1 advantage in general-election advertising over the Trump camp through the end of October.

Clinton’s campaign also shifted more spending to a particular segment of television advertising: local cable. Those buys allow candidates to target small pockets of cable viewers.

Clinton campaign aired 54 percent more ads on local cable than Obama’s campaign ran during the same period four years ago. Trump campaign ignored local cable as a tool.

The Republican candidate took a risk by relying so heavily on free media attention and digital advertising. “You have a billionaire running for president of the United States. Why isn’t the billionaire spending more money running for president,” questioned Michael Franz, a political scientist at Bowdoin College. “If he wins, he’s a genius,” Franz said. “But if he loses, particularly by a little, he probably left some points on the table by not diversifying his media strategy.”