A fund-raising PAC supporting Senator Deb Fischer, Republican of Nebraska, has been running this 30-second ad attacking her independent opponent, Dan Osborn, on television stations across the state since Wednesday at a cost of more than $372,000 so far, according to the Fischer campaign.
Here’s a look at the ad, its accuracy and its major takeaway.
On the Screen
A balding voter in a heavy flannel shirt, identified as “Shawn” from Bennington, Neb., addresses the camera from inside a garage. He keeps narrating as the camera zooms in on him tinkering under the hood of a car, wiping his hands with a rag and then, outside in the sun, looking grimly into the distance.
The ad skitters through common Republican attack themes on a border supposedly out of control and foreign workers stealing jobs. Over a picture of Mr. Osborn and the headline “Amnesty for Illegal Aliens,” video clips from the air show clusters of people laden with backpacks crossing a river. The inside of a warehouse is shown as the lights turn out, under the headline “American Jobs to Foreign Workers.” And an older man is shown unhappily examining paperwork under the headline “Social Security to Illegals.”
Shawn then returns, sharing the screen with a big subtitle — “Same Old Democrat B.S.” — before Ms. Fisher makes her only appearance, in the garage with Shawn, as a QR code pops up to help voters donate to her campaign.
The Script
narrator
“Dan Osborn is a Democrat in disguise. Kamala’s inflation is damn near costing me everything. But Dan Osborn is siding with them, not us. Osborn supports amnesty for illegal aliens, and wants to give our jobs away to foreign workers. Osborn even said he’ll give them our Social Security, too. Dan Osborn: same old Democrat B.S., just a different D.C. puppet.”
Accuracy
Mr. Osborn, a union leader and an industrial mechanic, has been assiduously dissociating himself from both the Democratic and Republican parties in his campaign against Ms. Fischer.
As a union leader, he has made job security a theme of his campaign, so the notion that he would give jobs away is hard to defend. “Illegal immigration creates a pool of cheap labor with no rights and is detrimental to every American worker,” he declares on his website.
The Fischer campaign pointed to an interview with Semafor last month in which Mr. Osborn expressed support for “some meaningful immigration reform,” saying: “These people are our friends. They’re our neighbors. A lot of them have been here 30 years or more, and I think it’s time they get into Social Security already.”
He went on to say, “There’s 80,000 open jobs in Nebraska that we can’t fill, that we can certainly use immigrant labor for.”
His point was that immigrants can help with labor shortages, not that they should take Americans’ jobs. And many undocumented immigrants use fake Social Security numbers to obtain employment, paying Social Security taxes with no prospect of receiving Social Security benefits.
The Takeaway
The Fischer campaign tried to ignore Mr. Osborn, an underfunded political newcomer, but the Senate race in Nebraska has proved surprisingly close. A late ad blitz from Ms. Fischer, the National Republican Senatorial Campaign and her joint fund-raising PAC, the Fischer Victory Fund, now seeks to bury him.
The ad tries to fight fire with fire. Mr. Osborn’s advertising has played up his very real career as an industrial mechanic. The Fischer camp is responding with its own mechanic who actually resembles Mr. Osborn — down to a plaid flannel shirt — and argues that the supposed independent is not independent at all.
The campaign said that Shawn, whose last name it declined to provide, is a mechanic and a construction worker.
The post A Nebraska Senate Ad Lets One Mechanic Throw a Wrench at Another appeared first on New York Times.
