As we get into the high season, we’re seeing pieces on the board, many that have been sitting on the sideline, come into play. Portman has endorsed Timken. Dolan’s extended family is pouring millions into a Super PAC. We here at POV have gone up on the air.
Everyone is looking earnestly to see what President Trump will do. To the greatest extent possible, the campaigns are working hard to improve their standing in Mar-a-Lago without running out of steam before early voting begins in April.
We’ve seen the limits of spending alone: Gibbons and Timken have paid dearly for middling and, at least in the case of Timken ephemeral, ballot share. Any candidate hoping to break out of this morass needs to stand out from the field. To win a Trump endorsement, a candidate has to show growing ballot share. To get that, a candidate has to own a critical issue.
JD can do that. Indeed, voters are eager and ready for him to do precisely that.
Washington politicians are furthest from the opinions of Republican primary voters, and even swing voting Americans, on the question of immigration. For decades Republican voters have demanded we create a merit based immigration system, reduce numbers, and fix our broken borders.
Instead, too many Republican leaders have rewarded big business with cheap labor while Democrats simply ignore the worst border crisis in half a century. Caught out in this disconnect, most GOP candidates just fall back on talking points cribbed directly from Trump speeches. It rings false. They move their libs, they utter the words, but they don’t speak from a place of conviction.
Open borders have a real impact on people in Ohio. A broken border means the drug cartels can freely ship fentanyl into our streets and prey upon working-class communities like the one where JD grew up. They kill thousands of Ohioans every year.
JD can personalize our broken border. He has unique credibility on the issue. He has a compelling personal story about drugs and addiction. That story is far too common due to the drugs and crime that flow across the southern border. He can connect that story to deindustrialization and the decline of the family. As a result, when he commits to being strong on borders, immigration, and crime, people will believe him.
But he also needs to be concrete. He needs to give people issues and promises — clear, direct, and credible — that take his personal credibility and translate it into policy, and which help voters see him as a senator.
Voters want to hear JD say “As your senator, I will sponsor a bill to declare the Mexican Drug Cartels international terrorist organizations. The same military that took out Osama Bin Laden will take out the drug lords.”
They want to hear him say “I will vote to fully fund the border wall. And I will fine big businesses that replace Americans with cheap foreign labor.”
They need to have somebody say to them “We should not be giving money to countries that ship us criminals and, when we deport them, refuse to take them back.”
They will believe it when he says “This is my commitment to the people of Ohio. Because if we don’t have a border, we don’t have a country. Every state is a border state.”
The campaign is uniquely positioned to help JD deliver this message by connecting it to his personal story. We hope they do. We would love to shoot a direct to camera ad with JD saying something like
I was raised by my grandparents because my mother got addicted to opioids.
Today, fentanyl pours over our border, poisoning our people. Joe Biden doesn’t care. Career politicians in both parties just talk.
Enough is enough. As your senator, I will declare the drug cartels terrorist organizations. Any country that refuses to accept deported illegals will lose its foreign aid.
This is personal to me. I’m JD Vance and I approve this message because no kid should have to grow up without a mother.
But we’re the Super PAC, so we can’t do that.
We can chop together bits of JD’s speeches, and emphasize his important policy commitments. When he makes a clear, crisp, declarative statement of what he will do as a senator, we’re well positioned to take the footage and audio and run with it.
We’re especially well positioned to cover advertising on broadcast. Right now candidates are enjoying considerable economies on cable, especially FOX News. Again, if we could do a direct to camera ad like the one above, we would spend the money and put it on cable starting at the end of this month at a steady $80k per week burn at the candidate rates. But we don’t have the ability to make such an ad. So instead, we’re trying to make the most compelling set of issue-focused ads that help define JD as a conservative and a prospective senator.
We’re satisfied with our first ad. It hits the central theme of the race on which JD is running: a corrupt oligarchy has plundered the country via outsourcing and mass immigration, and used identity politics to divide and distract from the plundering. Message delivered.
Now we have to translate that into issue commitments on immigration and trade. We have an ad made that features some of JD’s endorsers prominently, but the reality is that he doesn’t have a full slate with high quality video footage. The Tucker endorsement is great, and the MTG endorsement video from Bannon’s show is solid. Kirk doesn’t enjoy the name recognition of MTG, let alone Tucker. We don’t have Hawley on camera making an endorsement.
So we’re inclined to focus on identifying issues. We have an excellent spot cut featuring an angel mom. We’re inclined to run that next to move immigration front and center and make it the featured issue in the debate.