This is Planet Money from NPR.

So, as you may be aware, there is a presidential election coming up in a few weeks, and the

campaigns of the two candidates are moving a lot of money around right now to try to win

that election.

Yeah, we got reports of President Trump pulling millions of dollars out of Ohio and Iowa

and then Joe Biden throwing another million at Minnesota and then Trump putting money back

into Ohio and Iowa and for a person, these are life-changing amounts of money, but for

a presidential campaign, like this is nothing.

These are just tiny tactical moves on the edges of a much, much bigger thing.

Between the official campaigns and the Super PACs, political action committees, by election

day, the advertising spend for the presidential general election is expected to be a billion

dollars, a billion dollars for ads.

And the presidential campaigns are not just spending all that money willy-nilly.

They've got these very sophisticated models of the entire American electorate, models

that try to answer the question of how you can turn all of those dollars into a win

on election day.

And you know, we're nosy reporters.

We wanted to take a peek at those models.

So we asked, the Trump campaign and the Biden campaign, hey, will you just like shoot us

over your fancy strategy spreadsheets?

Yeah, you know, CCS on your internal emails.

But as it happens, they are quite secretive about this stuff.

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