[RAY BOGAN]
It’s the 2024 NFL draft – a fun moment to check out the future stars of our favorite teams, escape from the daily grind and most importantly, break free of politics and all the ads.
Except one.
The Biden campaign is running a 20 second ad that shows President Biden smiling with the Kansas City Chiefs and an old clip of Donald Trump in 2020 saying nobody cares about football. It ends with the message: make the right pick in November.
The Biden campaign also posted the ad on X, where people can pause it and examine every last frame. So eagle eyed critics were able to determine that a picture of Biden smiling holding a football is not in the U.S. It’s him in Australia in 2016 meeting with AFL executives for a game between the Carlton Blues and West Coast Eagles at the Melbourne Cricket Ground.
So why is Biden running an ad during the draft? Demographics.
We don’t have this year’s numbers yet, but according to SportsMediaWatch, the 2023 NFL draft had ratings for viewers aged 18-49 that were nearly on par with that year’s NCAA men’s basketball title game. That’s key for Biden – a Harvard poll of registered voters aged 18 – 29 found that Biden is leading Trump 50% to 37%.
But he has to keep those voters to win and support is slipping due to his handling of the Israel-Hamas war.
Democratic primary voters in Michigan and Wisconsin made their disapproval known by casting more than 150,000 uncommitted and uninstructed votes in those two primaries. His events have been interrupted by protestors calling for an immediate cease-fire.
Biden is also trying to reach younger voters on TikTok, but he’s receiving criticism for that too. He just signed a bill to ban the platform in the US if its Chinese parent-company fails to sell it. So some of those young voters he’s trying to win over say he’s being hypocritical.