Political groups have already spent or reserved more than $126 million to advertise for the 63-day campaign, with Republicans exceeding Democrats $77.2 million to $49.3 million, according to Kantar’s Campaign Media Analysis Group.
Loeffler leads the pack, spending or reserving nearly $42 million in ads for her runoff race, compared to $24.4 million from Warnock. And Perdue has set aside $19.3 million, while Ossoff has marked $13.7 million for ads.
“The outpouring of support for Kelly Loeffler and David Perdue has been tremendous, but we have the fight of our lives on our hands,” said Loeffler spokesman Stephen Lawson. “We need every single dollar, every single supporter, every single Republican vote because Chuck Schumer, Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff are stopping at nothing to radically transform our country into a socialist state.”
Republicans led the advertising battle in the general election with the aid of the Senate Leadership Fund, a Super PAC aligned to Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell. Loeffler, the co-owner of the WNBA’s Atlanta Dream who is married to New York Stock Exchange chairman Jeffrey Sprecher, also spent $23 million of her own money in the general election, but she does not plan on spending any more in the runoff race, according to Lawson.
The latest ads in Georgia have highlighted the national implications of the two races. One Perdue ad begins with Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer promising, “Now we take Georgia, then we change America!” Perdue then says he’d stop polices like defunding the police that both Democrats say they oppose. Meanwhile Ossoff is on the air with an ad saying he would work with President-elect Joe Biden to “beat this virus” and to “empower the medical experts, to rush economic relief for families and small businesses and invest in infrastructure to jumpstart our economy.” Biden is projected to defeat President Donald Trump in Georgia, although a state recount is underway and Trump continues to baselessly dispute the entire presidential election’s result.
Loeffler’s ads are viciously negative. One questions whether “this” America — showing a classroom of young students saying the pledge of allegiance — will still be America “if the radical left controls the Senate.” The ad then shows images of mobs, flashes signs saying “defund the police” and plasters a quote from a 2015 sermon Warnock gave after a police officer in Ferguson, Missouri, killed Michael Brown, in which he said some officers have a “gangster and thug mentality.”
Another Loeffler campaign ad attacks Warnock for honoring pastor Jeremiah Wright in 2008, even…
Read More News: Republicans hold $28 million ad advantage in Georgia Senate runoff races
