Wealthy businessman Jonathan Lamb is running in the May primary for Indiana’s safely red 6th Congressional District against businessman Greg Pence, the older brother of Vice President Mike Pence, and he's hoping to get his name out by advertising early. And we'll say this: His commercial, which ran during the Super Bowl, is going straight to the Daily Kos Elections Weird Ad Hall of Fame.
Lamb begins by telling the audience right off the bat that he's the "Republican outsider" who is running "against the vice president's brother." After that, the ad takes a strange, strange turn. Lamb says that what his opponent doesn't know "is that the Lamb family has been close to the White House for over a century." As lambs (the animals) are shown on the screen on the White House lawn in old-timey photos, the candidate declares, "President Woodrow Wilson had Lambs working for him in 1918 as a cost-cutting measure to keep the White House lawn looking its best." Yes, really. Watch the ad if you don't believe us.
Lamb then (presumably) ventures back to reality and says he's "an eighth generation Hoosier," and then declares "the Lamb family has a proven track-record of getting things done in D.C" which… we assume is part of the joke? Lamb then concludes by baaaing his last name ("I'm Jonathan Laaaamb, and I approve this message"). This may be the first campaign commercial we've ever seen that left us knowing less about the candidate than we thought we knew before we watched it.
Thanks to some generous self-funding, Lamb does have the resources to get his name out. Lamb loaned his campaign $500,000 before the end of 2017, and he had $468,000 on-hand on Dec. 31. That's slightly more than the $437,000 that Pence (who has done no self-funding) had. Of course, Pence isn't the one running spots saying his family ate grass for Woodrow Wilson, though the campaign is young.