NC campaign ad watch: One congressional candidate takes a hard right turn | Opinion
The battle for some of North Carolina’s most competitive congressional races is being fought over the airwaves.
With less than a month until the March 5 primary, political ads are beginning to take over your television, especially in open congressional districts with competitive or otherwise noteworthy Republican primaries.
Take the 8th Congressional District, where state Rep. John Bradford is one of six GOP candidates.
Bradford wields a significant cash advantage over his competitors, and he’s using it to run a slew of TV ads. The most notable ad shows Bradford using a baseball bat to smash a video screen playing one of President Joe Biden’s speeches.
“I’m John Bradford. I’m a reasonable guy, but this is outrageous,” Bradford says in the ad. “Record illegal aliens. Record drug trafficking. Record crime. That’s Joe Biden’s open border, and it’s criminal.”
Bradford ends the ad by saying he’ll “take a bat to Washington.”
It’s an eyebrow-raiser, and it might be the most surprising ad of the election cycle thus far, because it comes from a politician who has long presented himself as a thoughtful, moderate lawmaker willing to work across the aisle to get things done.
But in such a crowded primary, every candidate needs to do what they can to stand out. Perhaps that’s why Bradford has abandoned his milder rhetoric and taken on a more forceful, divisive tone. In addition to the baseball-bat-smashing ad, Bradford’s ads invoke conservative buzzwords like “woke garbage.”
It’s a shame that Bradford seems to think he needs to be someone else to get elected — no matter how inauthentic it looks. It is, after all, a marked change from the rhetoric he’s used in past campaigns, when he was trying to win in a state House district that only narrowly favored Republicans. Of course, it’s possible that Bradford was always a more conservative guy who simply positioned himself closer to the middle in order to hang on to his seat in an increasingly purple-ish district. The point is, we don’t know, and voters can now legitimately wonder whether the real Bradford is the one who wants to govern in a reasonable way, or the one holding a baseball bat.
Here’s what Bradford had to say when I reached out to him:
“I have always been a reasonable guy but even I know when enough is enough. Washington is broken and the border must be secured. This ad makes it crystal clear where I stand on Joe Biden’s failure to secure our border and protect our citizens from the fentanyl and gangs that are flooding into our country.”
Of course, Bradford’s thought process isn’t completely out of left field, since there doesn’t seem to be much room for moderates in Congress anymore. Primaries tend to favor the less moderate of candidates, and any remaining moderating forces in Washington certainly aren’t rewarded politically for their efforts.
Other ads to note
You might have seen an ad supporting House Speaker Tim Moore’s congressional run during the evening news. But it’s not paid for by Moore himself — it’s paid for by Defend American Jobs, part of a trio of super PACs backed by cryptocurrency executives and investors. Those super PACs have amassed upwards of $80 million to spend on candidates that back crypto-friendly policy in the 2024 elections, which apparently includes Moore.
One super PAC is spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on an ad campaign opposing Mark Harris in the 8th Congressional District. The ad highlights the absentee ballot fraud scandal involving Harris’s last congressional campaign back in 2018 and concludes with the line, “Mark Harris let his family down. He’ll let North Carolina down too.” The PAC, America Leads Action Inc., is only about a month old and it’s not clear who is behind it — or why. We’re investigating.
We’ll be tracking and fact-checking these ads through November, so if you see any that you’d like us to take a look at, let us know.
This story was originally published February 11, 2024 at 5:00 AM with the headline "NC campaign ad watch: One congressional candidate takes a hard right turn | Opinion."
