Two Democratic groups aligned with Vice President Kamala Harris are launching an ad featuring a fictitious Republican lawmaker who aims to ban adult online materials nationwide, marking the latest phase of their $2.5 million ad campaign accusing the GOP of interfering in people’s lives. In the 30-second ad, produced by Progress Action Fund and Defend the Vote and titled “Republicans Rubbing You the Wrong Way,” a young man is seen watching porn when an actor portraying a Republican congressman snatches away his phone, The Hill reported.
“What the hell man! How’d you get in here?” the man asks the lawmaker. “I’m your Republican congressman. Now that we’re in charge, we’re banning porn nationwide,” the congressman says. “You can’t tell me what to do! Get out of my bedroom, you creep!” the man replies, before the congressman says, “I won the last election, so it’s my decision. I’m just going to watch and make sure you don’t finish illegally.”
The ad, first shared with The Hill, is part of a campaign by two Democratic groups that have released several ads attacking Republicans over reproductive access. The ad campaign will be streamed on connected TVs, online platforms, and streaming services across all seven battleground states. While the ad is obviously ridiculous—since no political party is realistically poised to ban porn at the federal level—it contributes to a broader argument that Democrats are making about Republicans: that they are intruding into people’s personal lives. But it also smacks of desperation on the part of Democrats worried that Harris is set to lose badly to former President Donald Trump.
The that point, NBC elections analyst Steve Kornacki reported on the results of a new CNBC poll showing Trump with a 48-46 lead over Harris nationally, along with Harris’s negative ten popularity rating, just ten days before the 2024 election.
He noted: “This is what the CNBC poll finds: Trump 48 to 46 over Harris. There is a breakout here just of the seven core battleground states. It’s not quite as extensive a pool of voters, so the margin of error for just the battleground states is a little bit higher. But what the seven battleground state result shows is Trump at 48% across those seven states and Harris at 47% across those states.”
Continuing, Kornacki said: “Now, obviously, they don’t vote as a bloc; they vote individually. So just to give you a sense, though, in the battlegrounds, it’s a result that looks like the national result here, although even a point closer. So, you know, a notable finding that way. I think the bigger picture story is this was suggested as well in our own NBC poll recently. In the CNBC poll, it asks about the basic perception of the two candidates: Do you have a positive or negative feeling toward Trump or toward Harris?”
He added:
And you can see right here, neither one of them has a greater positive than negative; they’re both not that popular. But Trump, you can see the gap here, 42 positive, 48 negative. He is six points underwater on this question. Harris: 39 positive, 49 negative. She’s 10 points negative on this question. And the significance here is the trajectory of the Harris campaign on this sort of feelings thermometer. When she first got in the race, when she first entered, she was, you know, basically in the same ballpark as Trump on positive and negative.
After about six weeks as a candidate, she had actually, in our poll, moved above water on this question. A couple of weeks ago, we were polling this, and she had a higher positive than negative and had established an advantage. But now, our own NBC poll a couple weeks ago and now this CNBC poll both find that the advantage she seemed to have established here, you know, say back in September on this question, is gone. She’s back in that underwater territory with Trump again. And again, you take that and you look at the national result of Trump ahead by two. There’s probably a linkage between these things.
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