The DSCC recently cut back on ad reservations it originally made for Florida's Senate race, but Democrats have insisted that they're just reshuffling resources and that Rep. Patrick Murphy will continue to have plenty of air coverage. But now, a Republican group has also dropped a planned buy in Florida: Freedom Partners, the main arm of the Koch brothers' network, announced Wednesday that it's cancelling a $500,000 reservation it made for the week of Sept. 28 through Oct. 4 on behalf of GOP Sen. Marco Rubio.
According to CNN's Teddy Schliefer, who attended a Koch briefing, the group "feels confident" about Republican chances in the Sunshine State. That's believable: Rubio has consistently led in the polls, and he currently has a 47-41 advantage on Murphy according to the Huffington Post average. But "confident" does not mean "certain," and Republicans are by no means letting up.
Rubio, in fact, is out with a new negative ad that goes at Murphy's chief weakness: his thin pre-congressional resume, which was the target of a damaging local news report earlier this summer that accused him of inflating his personal biography. The spot very effectively contrasts footage of Murphy talking about himself—"I'm a certified public accountant"; "I'm a small-business guy"—with clips featuring TV reporters who immediately contradict him: "Murphy has never been a licensed CPA in Florida"; "Murphy was not a small-business owner."
The original report about Murphy's resume was overblown, and Murphy did in fact own a small business and work as a CPA. But sending out press releases that cite fact-checkers is easy; responding to an attack like this is very hard. Murphy has two choices here: He can either push back directly with a positive messages, perhaps with ads featuring people his environmental cleanup company helped following the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, or he can try to render Rubio unacceptable to voters, probably by tying him to Donald Trump.
The former approach is one we strenuously urged former Ohio Gov. Ted Strickland to adopt in the face of GOP assaults on his record as governor. Unfortunately, Strickland didn't heed that advice until it was too late and his image had suffered a near-irreparable hit, but at least he had real accomplishments in office to point to and could have had strong third-party validators make his case. For Murphy, that task would be considerably more difficult since he has less to point to, which suggests he'll just have to try slugging Rubio harder than he's getting hit.
And Murphy's allies are trying to do just that. The Senate Majority PAC, in concert with AFSCME, also just launched a new ad that goes after Rubio on Social Security and Medicare, though it doesn't have the same emotional punch as Rubio's own ad. The Democratic spot centers around a clip of Rubio says that "these programs actually weakened us as a people," before the narrator claims that Rubio wants to cut them because the insurance industry "would profit from his privatization plans." This is the first phase in a $10 million campaign announced long ago by SMP; AFSCME also recently announced it was kicking in $1.8 million for the effort. Hopefully future rounds will go at Rubio even harder.