One of the leading pro-Republican outside groups will try to chip away at Sen. Mark Udall’s support among women with a new ad launching Tuesday.
Crossroads GPS, the nonprofit arm of the Karl Rove-backed group American Crossroads, will debut a television advertisement throughout Colorado urging women voters to “vote ‘no’ on Mark Udall.”
Udall, a Democrat, has maintained a commanding lead over Republican Rep. Cory Gardner among women, whose support could decide the outcome of this key Senate race.
The ad, “Talk,” features four women chatting around a kitchen island about the upcoming election.
“We aren’t single-issue voters,” one woman says. “We care about good jobs that support our families.”
“Shouldn’t Mark Udall talk about the issues?” another offers.
The women criticize Udall for supporting President Obama and opposing the Keystone XL pipeline, before a woman narrator concludes, “Let’s vote ‘no’ on Mark Udall.”
The ad marks the opening salvo in a $6 million blitz Crossroads GPS has planned for Colorado through the end of October. The group is also running ads in other key Senate races across the country, including Iowa, North Carolina and Alaska.
This Crossroads ad in particular underscores the challenge Republicans have faced this year appealing to women voters, even as the GOP has enjoyed favorable odds of winning back a majority in the Senate.
Republican candidates trail Democrats among women in every competitive Senate race — but nowhere is the gap more pronounced than in Colorado, where Democrats have spent millions of dollars attacking Gardner for supporting a “personhood” measure as a state lawmaker that would have banned abortion.
“This was a bad idea driven by good intentions,” Gardner told the Denver Post in March. “I was not right. I can’t support personhood now.”
Gardner has attempted to make up ground by supporting over-the-counter oral contraceptives for women, although Democrats have countered that such a measure would prove more expensive for women by removing birth control from healthcare coverage.
Udall leads Gardner by roughly 4 percentage points on average in public polls, but he enjoys a much wider margin of support among women. A poll published last week by the Denver Post and conducted by SurveyUSA showed Udall with a 13-point lead among women.
