YouTube said Thursday that some political campaigns were running into difficulty finding advertising space at the times and locations they wanted because of rising demand.
A spokesperson for YouTube said the company still has plenty of advertising inventory, but certain slots were booked because of demand from a variety of advertisers, including ad campaigns unrelated to the election targeted at car buyers and holiday shoppers.
Politics has exploded on the popular online video service this year, as Trump and Biden bought up prominent YouTube ad space and others have used YouTube to drive up voter turnout, raise money or court livestreamers. The coronavirus pandemic also has more people turning to streaming video.
Bloomberg News first reported Thursday that YouTube was struggling to place all the ads in front of the desired audiences that political campaigns wanted. Prices for some slots in presidential swing states had doubled, it said.
YouTube said it was not seeing a consistent spike in particular states and that the pattern of increased spending was across the board.
Sen. Mitt Romney: Trump has ’40 percent’ chance of getting re-elected
Sen. Mitt Romney, R-Utah, didn’t vote for Trump this year, but he did prognosticate this summer that Trump would be re-elected.
Now, Romney feels less certain that is going to happen.
“Not as confident as I was before,” Romney told reporters in the capitol on Thursday when asked about Trump’s chances. “I think he’s got better, a better chance than the prognosticators are predicting at this stage. I think I saw a tweet today saying it’s 12 percent chance, someone else said 10 percent chance. I think it’s much more like 40 percent, but time will tell.”
Trump and Biden prepare for final bout with debate to focus on Covid-19, race
The gloves will be off and so will the mics in the final showdown between President Donald Trump and Democratic nominee Joe Biden.
The stage, complete with plexiglass barriers, is set for the rivals’ second and final debate, which will kick off at 9 p.m. ET in Nashville on Thursday with NBC News’ Kristen Welker in the moderator’s chair.
Over the course of 90 commercial-free minutes, the candidates will spend about 15 minutes on each of six topics: fighting Covid-19, American families, race in America, climate change, national security and leadership.
And in a new twist, each candidate will have two uninterrupted minutes to address each topic while the others’ microphone is turned off in order to avoid a repeat of the shouty first debate in Cleveland.
Read the story, which will be updated throughout the night.
Trump focuses on Hunter Biden; Biden campaign says ‘be our guest.’
Trump plans to focus attention on Biden’s son Hunter and his business activities overseas.
As part of that strategy, Trump’s guest list includes Tony Bobulinski, the former Hunter Biden business partner who told the New York Post that Joe Biden was in line to take a cut of a Chinese business deal negotiated by his son in early 2017.
Biden’s aides told NBC News they’re not worried about the topic.
“Be our guest,” Biden deputy campaign manager Kate Bedingfield told NBC News ahead of the debate in Nashville. “He’s been trying to land this for 18 months. It got him impeached. It hasn’t worked.”
Bedingfield also said she would not “dignify” the question of whether material allegedly retrieved from Hunter Biden’s laptop with the help of indicted former Trump campaign manager Steve Bannon and former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani is real.
NBC has reported the FBI is looking into how the material was acquired.
North Carolina GOP asks Supreme Court to roll back extra time for accepting mail-in ballots
Republicans in the presidential battleground state of North Carolina asked the U.S. Supreme Court Thursday to block lower court rulings that allowed six extra days for accepting ballots sent by mail.
The Trump campaign, the state and national Republican parties, and Republican leaders of the state legislature said decisions by North Carolina’s Board of Elections, upheld by federal courts, “pose an immediate threat to the integrity of the federal elections process.”
Read the story.
The final showdown: 5 things to watch in last Trump-Biden debate
Any Americans still on the fence — and who haven’t been among the hordes of early voters — will have one final chance to hear from President Donald Trump and Joe Biden in their last debate Thursday, during which the president will try to re-energize his base and close the polling gap behind Biden.
Thursday’s debate in Nashville, Tennessee, was supposed to be the third faceoff of 2020, but will instead be the second of only two presidential debates after Trump declined to participate in one scheduled for last week after it was moved to a virtual format following his Covid-19 diagnosis.
Trump’s polling deficit has only solidified since the poorly reviewed first debate in Cleveland and with more than 30 million votes already cast and, less than two weeks before Election Day, he is running out of time.
Here are five things to watch.
Voter who didn’t cast ballot in 2016 explains why 2020 is different
David Litko didn’t bother voting in 2016. He didn’t think his vote mattered.
That’s not how the McKeesport, Pennsylvania, resident is approaching 2020. He is voting this time around — and he’s backing former Vice President Joe Biden in the pivotal swing state.
Litko, 61, represents a crucial 2020 voting block — people who did not vote in the 2016 presidential race but are this time. He told NBC News that he was disturbed by President Donald Trump’s repeated efforts at delegitimizing mail-in voting — saying the president’s “anti-democratic leanings” led him to register.
“I didn’t vote in 2016 because, well, I didn’t think it mattered. Then Pennsylvania was won by just, what was it? 44,000 votes?” Litko said, adding, “I was afraid that Trump was trending toward wanting to become president for life, invalidating democracy, and so I wanted to vote against that.”
Cher and Lizzo lend their voices to Biden campaign
Former President Obama will not be the only star stumping for Joe Biden this week. The Biden campaign getting help from two of music’s biggest names.
Singer and songwriter Lizzo will be hitting the campaign trail for the Democratic candidate. Tomorrow, she will be making two stops in the Detroit area to discuss early voting, with a focus on young people.
Last week, Lizzo wore a custom Christian Siriano dress to the Billboard Music Awards and told the audience “there’s power in your voice.”
Superstar singer Cher will also be hitting the trail for the Biden-Harris ticket. The Grammy-winning singer and Oscar-winning actress will make stops in Nevada and Arizona this weekend on behalf of the campaign.
Photo: Debate’s socially distanced seating
Trump tests negative for Covid-19 on plane ride to debate
President Trump tested negative for Covid-19 on his way to the debate.
“We tested him on the way here (on the plane) and he tested negative,”said White House chief of staff Mark Meadows.
Also traveling with the president were a mix of staffers and family including Ivanka Trump, Jared Kushner, Tiffany Trump, Jason Miller, Robert O’Brien, Dan Scavino — with no mask — and Kayleigh McEnany.
Biden ready to fight back if Trump goes after his family, campaign says
Ahead of tonight’s debate, the Biden campaign is telegraphing that if President Trump goes after Joe Biden’s family, it plans on attacking him for spreading and amplifying Russian disinformation.
In a pre-debate press call with reporters, the campaign’s deputy manager, Kate Bedingfield, said that the campaign expected Trump “to continue to bully” and attack Hunter Biden and his foreign dealings during tonight’s debate. She said that Biden is prepared for those attacks as well, hoping to flip the attention to the fact that Trump is more obsessed with Biden’s family than America’s families amid a pandemic.
“Here’s the thing, these attacks are backfiring on Trump. You know, despite leveling them in the first debate, poll after poll showed voters resoundingly thought Biden won that debate because voters are sick and tired of Trump’s lies and we’ve heard the same debunked atta
cks for over a year,” she said.
A senior campaign adviser, Symone Sanders, also commented on the Commission on Presidential Debate’s decision to mute the microphones, saying that the debate will serve as “a test of presidential temperament,” especially for the president.