The Koch-funded dark money group, Americans For Prosperity, will air another ad in which former Obama voters give people permission to ditch the president:
The ad will air in all eleven battleground states with $6 million behind it. Dan Lothian reports that the group has some big plans for next week:
[Americans For Prosperity] plans to "essentially own the front page of YouTube" on Thursday, when Republican presidential hopeful Mitt Romney officially accepts the nomination in Tampa, according to Levi Russell the groups director of public affairs. The group is buying the large banner space at the top of YouTube’s main page. "We’ll be running a poll on how visitors feel about President Obama and they’ll have the ability to cycle through 3 of our most recent national TV spots," Russell said.
In other outside spending news, MoveOn.org, in typically crude fashion, raises the spectre of coat-hanger abortions in a new TV ad that "will begin running on cable nationwide and specifically on Oxygen network for a week, [and] stars actress Lisa Edelstein, best known for her role on the Fox primetime hit House":
Stepping back, Paul Steinhauser breaks down the completely different ad strategies from the two presidential campaigns:
"Chicago sees this contest as a seven-month run and Boston sees it as a three-month sprint," says Kantar Media/Campaign Media Analysis Group Vice President Elizabeth Wilner. … Obama campaign officials are very upfront about their strategy of taking to the airwaves early to get a jump on defining Romney. "From a messaging standpoint, Chicago is banking on its summertime swamping of Romney with ads about Bain Capital, outsourcing, tax returns, abortion and education, culminating in its pre-convention rollout of Bill Clinton's 30-second case for a second Obama term," says Wilner. "This wasn't just a hunch for them-it was a calculation made out of necessity given the GOP's overall ad spending advantage, which started snowballing in mid-July and is expected to get even bigger as we enter the fall."
But while pro-Romney super PACs like Restore Our Future, Crossroads, and Americans for Prosperity have blanketed the airwaves with spots critical of the president, the Romney campaign held a lot of their firepower in the early months of the general election. "Boston is betting on its use of the Olympics and GOP convention to start the rollout of Romney's biography, running mate and overall vision for America"
The campaigns only released web videos today. Team Obama has two notable ads, the first showing women-on-the-street in Ohio posing hypothetical policy questions to Romney/Ryan, and the other featuring Republican women who support the president:
Speaking of cross-party support, HRC and the Freedom To Marry campaign plan to air this TV ad starring San Diego Republican Mayor Jerry Sanders next week during the convention:
Ad War archive here.
The Dish 