As the title of this blog indicates, I live in Connecticut. Nevertheless, I just heard a commercial on the radio in the Weprin-Turner race in New York City. That is the special election to fill the seat left vacant when Anthony Weiner texted in his resignation from Congress.
I need to put this in context for those of you who do not live near New York. The radio station playing the ad broadcasts to the NY metropolitan area which includes something like 25 congressional districts. That means that the campaign was paying to send a message to an audience that was about 96% outside the district. Indeed, since today is Saturday and the district has a heavy concentration of orthodox Jews who would not be listening to the radio on the sabbath, the percentage of the listening audience in the district is likely less than 4%. Even so, in the space of ten minutes, I heard three different commercials from the Democrat Weprin claiming that the GOP candidate was a Tea Party radical who wants to gut social security and medicare.
These ads are a true sign of desperation by the Democrats. They know that they have to do something, but there is not much left available at this late date. The press is reporting that the DNC has put half a million dollars into the Weprin campaign in the last week, and my guess is that this money was used for the blunderbuss attack ads on the radio. It does surprise me that the ads use the Tea Party theme to attack Turner. Anyone who pays the slightest attention to the race knows that Turner is far from a Tea Party Republican. Compared to far left liberal like Weprin, Turner is a staunch conservative, but in the GOP as a whole, he is clearly a moderate.
It will be interesting to see if the ads work.
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