Shit is getting serious in Ohio:
A key Democratic outside group is reserving nearly $10 million for election ads in the battleground state of Ohio, hoping to overcome a massive spending spree by GOP Sen. Rob Portman.
Senate Majority PAC is reserving $9.5 million in airtime aimed at ousting Portman and aiding Democrat Ted Strickland, pushing the total money committed there to more than $50 million.
The group, affiliated with Democratic leadership, has already spent $1.8 million attacking Portman for exporting U.S. jobs from Ohio and for being a D.C. insider. In a statement, Senate Majority PAC spokesman Shripal Shah said the ad campaign will continue the same theme.
“As a 30-year Washington insider, Rob Portman has spent his career going to bat for corporations that ship jobs overseas and big banks on Wall Street — all at the expense of people across Ohio,” Shah said. “We are going to make sure Ohio voters know the truth about his record; they deserve better than a Senator who only works for special interests.”
The slate of ads reserved this week will begin running in September.
Portman launched his own massive ad buy last week, reserving $15 million in TV and digital ads for the fall. Portman is a prodigious fundraiser and has outraised Strickland consistently, making the air support from Senate Majority PAC a welcome development for Democrats.
The Koch Brothers have also been spending big to defeat Strickland and help Portman but his their attack ads are starting to backfire. Like this ad of a worker blaming all the job losses in Ohio on Strickland:
Mr. Botts, now 58, had worked as a supervisor at Airborne Express in Wilmington for 25 years — half his life. He told the cameras how DHL, the subsidiary of a German company, had bought Airborne and seemed hellbent on spending. The out-of-state camera crew listened, paying close attention to each Strickland reference, although Mr. Botts talked broadly about life during the Great Recession.
“I really think it’s a combination of errors,” Mr. Botts said of his lost job, speaking on the phone from his home in Winchester, Ohio. “It’s just a little bit of this and a little bit of that and how the economy was going around the country. ... Everything kind of hit the fan at once.”
Mr. Botts said he believes Mr. Strickland created a tax-and-spend environment that chased some jobs out of Ohio. Then, when Mr. Botts lost his own job, he didn’t feel that Mr. Strickland, who visited the town of 13,000 after the announcement to cut 7,500 jobs, did enough.
The 30-second attack ad made it sound as though Mr. Strickland was at fault.
The whole story began in 2003, when DHL purchased Airborne, a fact omitted from the politicized version of Mr. Botts’ lengthier account. The closing came in November, 2008, well into a market crash and the Great Recession, in which nearly 10 million American jobs were lost.
Time magazine, reflecting on the unraveling economy, considered the Airborne acquisition the seventh worst business deal in America. In other parts of the world, DHL is a leader in shipping. But in the United States, it couldn’t crack the dominance of UPS and FedEx.
You didn’t hear the rest of the story in the ad.
Video production, relatively speaking, is cheap. What costs money is television airtime — and the years of data collection on every U.S. voter to know when and how they are vulnerable.
Since 2010, i360, a data company funded by Freedom Partners, has stretched the influential power of political ads by gathering and digitizing the habits of up to 250 million American voters.
The DHL video featuring Mr. Botts cost $1.8 million to air across Ohio in the week of Ohio’s March 15 primary. For special targeting of the most vulnerable voters, i360 allocated $280,443 for online deployment and $1.6 million for cable TV.
The four major networks in Cleveland sold $90,000 in ad time to play the 30-second spot more than 100 times that week, FEC records show. Another firm, Target Enterprises of California, appears to have collected a commission to broker the sales. Prime-time slots went for more than $2,000 per minute.
In all that, the rest of Mr. Botts’ story was never told.
Another attack ad against Strickland from the Super PAC Fighting for Ohio Fund has also been called for making the false statement that Strickland raised taxes as Governors hence contributing to the job losses that happened during the beginning of the great recession:
The ad misfires with its claim about “$800 million in tax increases” under Strickland. That’s based on Strickland postponing for one year the last year of a planned five-year tax decrease in order to balance the state budget. No one paid higher income tax rates during that freeze year; they just didn’t get the scheduled tax cut.
Here’s the brief history: In 2004, then Gov. Bob Taft signed a multiyear plan to reduce business and individual income taxes. The income tax rate cuts were scheduled to be phased in over five years, with income tax rates ending up 21 percent lower than they were in 2004.
The fifth and final year of the phased-in plan called for a 4.2 percent cut in the income tax rate. But Strickland, facing an $851 million budget shortfall, decided in late 2009 to postpone that cut for a year.
Some Strickland opponents — including Republican John Kasich, who went on to defeat Strickland in the 2010 gubernatorial election — said Strickland’s decision amounted to raising taxes. But Ohioans didn’t pay more in 2009 than they did in 2008. In fact, the Toledo Blade noted in an editorial that some paid less.
Toledo Blade editorial, Oct. 5, 2009: The advantage of putting off the final phase of the tax cut is that it will be hardly noticed. Ohioans won’t pay more for 2009 than 2008 because the indexed personal exemption is due to increase from its current $1,500 to $1,550. In some case, taxpayers might actually owe less.
The ad cites an October 2010 fact-checking article by PolitiFact Ohio that rated as “Mostly True” Kasich’s claim that Strickland “raised taxes last year to the tune of $840 million.” It’s true that Ohioans got a planned tax cut taken away from them for a year. But that’s not the same as a tax increase. Besides, the PolitiFact analysis was a one-year snapshot. It did not consider the net impact on income taxes under Strickland’s governorship. The article also noted that there were “no guarantees” the freeze would be lifted and that promised tax cuts would be delivered the following year. But that final income tax rate cut did happen, and went into effect in January 2011, just before Strickland left office.
In all, the 2005 tax plan resulted in a 21 percent income tax rate decrease. But not all of that was during Strickland’s time in office. In the years Strickland was governor, there was a roughly 13 percent reduction in income tax rates for taxpayers at every income level, according to data from the Ohio Department of Taxation. That resulted in a cumulative decrease of nearly $4 billion in individual income taxes paid during Strickland’s time in office.
We can defeat Portman but we have to make sure our base gets out and votes. Click here to donate and get involved with Strickland’s campaign.