Over the past weekend, the following ad starting running in Memphis.
This is Travis Childers flexing his financial advantage. The word is that Childers has been polling extensively, and the messaging you are now seeing reflects what they’ve obviously found. It’s a sign of how serious Childers takes Nunnelee.
Back in June, I said this.
Based on this feedback plus whatever their internal polls are saying, I think that it’s very possible that Childers and the DCCC will take off the gloves and bring the fight to Nunnelee sooner rather than later. How hard and how fast they come will tell you how seriously they take Nunnelee.
Though a lot of the message is predictable parsing, there is some outright B.S. Childers said in his ad that he would “oppose big spending budgets”. In just two of his bills (Stimulus I and II) both of which he fully supported, he voted for over $800,000,000,000.00 worth of government spending in the last year alone. If that’s not “big spending budgets”, I am not exactly sure what is. Nunnelee’s camp should really go after him on that.
Childers “for it before he waited two days before he voted against it before he lamented it before he committed not to support repealing it” Obamacare stance I think will become a bigger issue going forward. He, like most Congressional Democratic candidates will avoid talking about healthcare, although polling consistently shows that that is one of the huge things on everyone’s mind. And though Childers will try to talk about jobs, the simple fact is that unemployment in his district is up over 60% since the day he took office, and it’s going to be very hard for him to blame Haley Barbour or George W. Bush for that problem.
The real issue though is will Nunnelee take the bait? Childers apparently wants a rerun of the nasty 2008 campaign. He has more money to spend, so making it nasty makes it a fight that he’s better able to wage. Greg Davis immediately got in the mud pit with Childers and it did not work out well for him. That’s not to say that Nunnelee should get rolled or sit idly by and lose a messaging war. So far, Nunnelee through the primary has been very disciplined in his messaging. He’s united the party behind him and the polling that’s been done shows that he’s got a little tailwind at his back. Nunnelee’s challenges will be to (1) raise enough money to get his message out and (2) keep it clean and disciplined and earn enough votes from Travis Childers’s backyard to win.
We will see soon as more polling and more messaging comes alive in this race.
As has been disclosed numerous times, the author has made a reportable contribution in this race.
