ATLANTA — Communist China is coming. So is the Ku Klux Klan. And the ghost of Fidel Castro.
If voters believe the attack ads coming out of Georgia ahead of Tuesday’s Senate runoff races, a win for Democratic challengers Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock would mean “amnesty for illegals,” massive tax hikes, and possibly the death of Santa.
If Republican incumbent Sens. David Perdue and Kelly Loeffler win, Georgians can kiss their healthcare goodbye and get ready to be looted by two corrupt politicians eager to pocket as much money as they can for themselves.
Those are just some of the absurd negative campaign ads at the center of Georgia’s heated Senate runoff races.
Republicans and Democrats have inundated the state with a flood of advertising, exposing residents like Jacob Dixon to nearly 500 ads in the nine weeks between Nov. 3 and Jan. 5.
A solid majority of those ads, about 70%, are either partially or entirely negative.
“You can’t escape them,” Dixon told the Washington Examiner on Monday. “They are everywhere. On television, the internet, in your mailbox, on the side of buses, and even on Tinder if you can believe it. Everywhere.”
In all, more than $450 million will be spent on advertising for the two races.
The stakes couldn’t be higher, with the winners not only determining which party controls the upper chamber of Congress but also the success of President-elect Joe Biden’s legislative agenda.
If Perdue or Loeffler beats their Democratic rival, the GOP will maintain its current control of the Senate and could push back on Biden’s legislative agenda.
If Ossoff and Warnock win, it would give Democrats a 50-50 split, with Vice President-elect Kamala Harris casting the tiebreaking vote.
Biden became the first Democratic White House candidate to flip Georgia from red to blue since 1992. His victory bolstered his party’s hopes of picking up two senatorial wins, and the money quickly followed.
Ossoff and Warnock are hauling in record small-dollar cash donations, but they are getting out-advertised by their Republican rivals, thanks in part to a megadonor-funded ad blitz from GOP super PACs. Across the state, Republicans hold an overall advertising advantage, according to AdImpact.
Republicans have been boosted by $86 million in outside spending, compared to $30 million spent by outside Democratic groups on TV advertising. Along with the candidates, Republican super PACs — American Crossroads, Senate Leadership Fund, and Peachtree PAC — round out the seven largest Georgia spenders, according to Ad Age.
But it’s Ossoff who sponsored the most aired ad of the runoff cycle — a 30-second spot that alleges Perdue was too busy fattening his own stock portfolio after a coronavirus briefing to address the pandemic that’s infected more than 668,000 people in Georgia and killed more than 10,600 in the state.
The ad has run 9,633 times in 28 days or about 344 times a day.
Perdue’s response to the ad, in which he stresses he was cleared of any wrongdoing by the Senate Ethics Committee and the Department of Justice, is the second-most aired commercial, having run 9,031 times in 29 days, or about 311 times a day, according to data from AdImpact. Loeffler, who has also been accused of getting rich off the pandemic, released a similar ad defending herself.
Neither GOP ad made a good impression on Alyssa Mastromonaco, former White House deputy chief of staff for President Barack Obama.
“I don’t think being exonerated ever gets you where you want to go,” Mastromonaco said on Crooked Media. “I think they’re sad. It’s like, sad trombone for these two. They have to have ads like, ‘We didn’t cheat you, the people of Georgia.’ That’s literally all they say.”
Then, there’s the glossy GOP mailer that was sent out before Christmas with a photo of Santa crying into his white gloves with a message warning, “Not even Santa will be safe if Warnock and Ossoff win in Georgia.”
Staying on theme, a Democratic ad by the liberal PAC MeidasTouch called the “Grinches of Georgia,” takes swipes at “Looting Loeffler and Chicken Perdue” and the controversies surrounding stock purchases they made. “Their stockings were stuffed from the stocks that they sold when they heard COVID was coming before we were told,” the ad says. “They sold shares in casinos, airlines, T.J. Maxx and invested in drugs and in medical masks. They bought stocks that would rise, sold stock that would fall.”
The same group also put out a two-minute, 30-second YouTube ad called, “Nobody likes Kelly Loeffler,” in which liberal TV hosts, as well as conservative ones at Fox News, take swipes at Loeffler and her billionaire husband, Jeffrey Sprecher, who is the CEO of Intercontinental Exchange, which owns the New York Stock Exchange.
But Loeffler is no shrinking violet.
Her campaign has hammered Warnock in various attack ads, claiming that if he wins, Georgians will be responsible for electing “America’s first Marxist senator.”
Then, there’s Castro.
Loeffler has accused Warnock of hosting Cuba’s former leader at his church when Warnock was a youth pastor decades ago. While there is no evidence that Warnock played a role in extending an invitation to Castro, it hasn’t stopped Loeffler or her allies from suggesting the two were as thick as thieves.
On Twitter, she wrote, “@ReverandWarnock celebrated Fidel Castro & helped welcome him to his church. Need we say more? He’s the most dangerous and radical candidate in America.”
She’s also alleged that Warnock is trying to cover up a domestic abuse incident involving him driving over his ex-wife’s foot. No charges were brought against Warnock, but that hasn’t stopped Loeffler from suggesting something nefarious.
Despite all of the false accusations between the four candidates and their allies, one has stuck out.
In the final days leading up to the runoff, Ossoff has made the bold claim that Loeffler has been “campaigning with a klansman.”
Specifically, he attacked Loeffler for taking a picture with Chester Doles, a neo-Nazi and former KKK member who marched at the 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville.
“Here’s the bottom line, Kelly Loeffler has been campaigning with a klansman,” Ossoff said on Fox News.
Loeffler’s campaign has pushed back and said the senator did not know who Doles was, but now that she does, she condemns him, would have refused to take a picture with him, and would have kicked him out of the event.
CNN’s Jake Tapper recently pressed Ossoff about his accusation and noted that “this is not, at all, the same as campaigning with a klansman.”
“I’m sure you’ve taken photos with thousands of strangers,” Tapper said. “Isn’t it important for candidates to tell the truth?”
“It is,” Ossoff answered but insisted that the Doles incident wasn’t an isolated one and claimed that “radical white supremacists” were drawn to Loeffler’s campaign because almost all of her attack ads on television, radio, and online have been racist in nature “on the Black Lives Matter movement and on the black church.”
