With less than a week until the general election, candidates on all sides of the aisle are making last-minute pitches to potential voters.
A recent controversial ad by the National Republican Congressional Committee says Second District candidate Brad Ashford’s stance on the good time law is to blame for the early release of convicted killer Nikko Jenkins.
Ashford says the ad is false and distracting.
“The facts are that it’s false, it’s wrongheaded, it shows where Washington is broken. This is the kind of Washington-style politics that we’re trying to fix, and so on the political side it’s a Hail Mary.”
UNO political scientist Randy Adkins says such political ads are an effort to drive up the opponent’s disapproval rating. But he says that’s not without risk.
“The danger that the candidate or the party running the ad is that there could potentially be a backlash effect where people think this is really just too much, it’s too over the top. And when that happens, you could see that it could drive up the negatives of the challenger, but it could drive up the negatives of your own candidate too. And that’s certainly not what you want to happen.”
Republican incumbent Lee Terry’s campaign manager, Kent Grisham, says in a statement “This is not an ad we would have made. Our campaign has not and will not use any specific criminal’s or any specific victim’s name or image in any of our ads.” Grisham says the ad highlights a legitimate issue.
A new poll from DFM Research shows Ashford with a 5 point lead over Terry. The poll has a margin of error of 4.6 percent.