Election Day is less than two weeks away, and the hard-fought Kentucky Senate race is getting uglier. Alison Lundergan Grimes (D) is throwing everything but the kitchen sink at Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-KY) in a new TV ad released Wednesday.
The 30-second spot, first reported by the Washington Post’s Greg Sargent, portrays McConnell as a mendacious senator criticized by fact-checkers for making “false, misleading, debunked” statements who’s willing to shut down the government to get his way.
It also features McConnell’s privately recorded remarks to wealthy donors against a minimum wage hike, extending unemployment benefits and student loan reforms backed by Democrats (which largely reflect his public stances against them).
“We’re not going to be debating all these gosh darn proposals. That’s all we do in the Senate is vote on things like raising the minimum wage … cost the country 500,000 new jobs; extending unemployment,” McConnell told donors. “The student loan package the other day, that’s just going to make things worse. These people believe in all the wrong things.”
A Grimes campaign official wouldn’t specify how much the campaign was spending to air the ad, but said the purchase was “significant.”
Recent polls show McConnell and Grimes in a statistical dead heat, with the Republican incumbent retaining a slight edge.
