The Super Bowl has always been known for excess. Be it the huge amounts of pre-game hype or the massive prices for commercials during the game, the Super Bowl is one of the flashiest events of the year. Part of the hype this year was the anticipation of two political ads that aired during the game: one from President Trump, one from former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg. A striking thing about them was their similarity in some respects.

One common vein was their break from the otherwise rancorous debate surrounding the 2020 election. Trump’s ad focused on the story of Alice Johnson, a nonviolent drug offender sentenced to life in prison, whose sentence was eventually commuted by Trump after the intervention of socialite Kim Kardashian. The ad, featuring white text on a black background interspersed with images of Johnson reunited with her family, was a departure from the standard Trump playbook, which calls for being loud, boisterous, and spontaneous. Bloomberg’s 60-second spot told the story of George Kemp, a 20-year-old football player from Houston who was killed in a shooting in 2013. The ad was somber but hopeful. It was narrated by Kemp’s mother, who has advocated for gun restrictions since his death and praises Bloomberg’s record on gun control. Neither candidate was willing to air a divisive attack ad on America’s biggest sporting stage, but both were willing to air sensitive, emotional political issues in a stirring way.

The second similarity between these two ads was what was left unsaid. Trump’s touted his record on criminal justice reform, but needs more context. Trump did sign the bipartisan FIRST STEP Act in December of 2018. The law eased mandatory minimum sentencing guidelines for nonviolent drug offenses, weakened the “three strikes and you’re out” rule, expanded credit for good time, and implemented some lesser justice-system reforms. Johnson wasn’t actually a beneficiary of the act, because her sentence was commuted by the president the previous summer. Furthermore, critics rightly said that clemency should not occur because of celebrity intervention but rather through comprehensive policy.

Bloomberg’s ad focused on gun violence affecting children, but would have been better had it described the fuller magnitude of the gun problem. A person viewing the ad, with its images of Kemp as a young child in oversized football pads and of mourning after the Sandy Hook school shooting, might believe he was killed as a child, obscuring the fact that he was shot at the age of 20. Here lies the tragedy in the shooting statistic Bloomberg cited: While 2,900 0- to 19-year-olds are killed each year due to gun violence, that number is 1,500 for 0- to 17-year-olds, and it doesn’t really tell the story of the thousands of deaths, uncovered in the news, that occur--like Kemp’s shooting death--between teenagers after altercations. Bloomberg should be lauded for bringing these stories into the limelight, but should focus more on the scourge that is everyday gun violence.

Finally, both ads made a pitch to black voters. Trump’s messaging has evolved from 2016 to highlight accomplishments for the black community during his administration, rather than just asking: “what do you have to lose?” While Trump cannot claim sole credit (no administration could) for record-low black unemployment rates or for criminal justice reform (however preliminary), his pitch is intended to show progress for the black community. His argument in this respect in 2020 will certainly be based on the claim that the Democratic Party has always taken the black vote for granted without delivering material improvements in their lives. Whether Trump succeeds in winning over much of the black vote remains to be seen, but it should be remembered that he won a greater share of it than both Mitt Romney and John McCain (although this can also be attributed to low black turnout).

Bloomberg’s ad had a broader audience, since it included memories of school shootings which caused universal outrage. In focusing on Kemp’s story, however, it was targeting the scourge of shootings committed by young men against each other. According to the Giffords Law Center, the roughly 12,000 fatal shootings, and 80,000 non-fatal shootings, that largely comprise interpersonal gun violence often include teenagers of color shooting one another. Bloomberg’s ad did make a pitch to minority communities, in an acknowledgement that the constant gun violence this nation faces is not primarily in the tragic mass shootings which always draw headlines, but rather in the thousands of individual tragedies which go largely unreported every day. If Bloomberg wants to win the Democratic nomination, he must sway anyone he can to his side, and stressing this issue to the black community may be the place to start.