You can learn a few things about the upcoming primary in West Virginia from campaign ads.
I’m not talking about the content of the ads, which is pure dreck that I’d advise everyone to ignore. Candidates and their unaffiliated political action committees will say anything to get the result they’re seeking.
As the GOP gubernatorial primary gets nearer, I wouldn’t be surprised to see ads claiming Chris Miller owns transgender guns and Patrick Morrisey has a prehensile tail. A newer, very real ad calls candidate Moore Capito “liberal,†which is kind of like claiming Liberace was festive, but totally straight. Someone might believe it, I guess.
All of these candidates are wealthy. All of them have deep political connections. They are not outsiders. They are not likely looking out for ordinary West Virginians. I get the feeling most of you know that already.
The useful part of these 30-second farces is the end tag, often mumbled at lightning speed, telling you who paid for an animation of Morrisey wearing a gnome cap, head barely above a podium, as he is called short in stature but big on greed. (In that particular case, the ad was paid for by West Virginia Forward, a political action committee headed up by Chris Miller’s dad.)
The volley of similar attack ads launched at Miller, mainly featuring commercials he did for his car dealership dressed in drag or making fun of Donald Trump (whom Miller recently called “the best president of my lifetime†in an ad, which is such an embarrassing level of pandering it made me wonder how many takes they had to do before they got one without him laughing) were paid for by Black Bear PAC.
This is a pro-Morrisey super PAC that has a presence in ÂÒÂ×ÄÚÉä but is based in Massachusetts. (Black Bear also received more than half of its funding from another PAC, Club for Growth, which is spending money against Gov. Jim Justice in the Republican U.S. Senate primary, according to campaign finance tracker OpenSecrets.)
For the majority of the primary window, PACs backing Morrisey and Miller were swapping broadsides, which indicated the two candidates, or at least their dark-money backers, viewed each other as the main competition.
Now, however, Black Bear has turned its sights on Capito, running an ad featuring an image of the candidate with a silver spoon Photoshopped in his mouth. Again, the whole thing is kind of ridiculous. We all know Capito is wealthy and well-connected. His mother serves in the U.S. Senate and his grandfather was a coal magnate and former governor.
Morrisey is wealthy and well-connected, too. But the interesting thing is that Capito had more or less been outside the fray until now. Black Bear dragging him in indicates that Morrisey’s backers are now more concerned about Capito than Miller.
The theory tracks with recent polling, although I’m not sure if external polls are driving this shift or serve more as a confirmation of what insiders were already seeing. In fact, I’d be more inclined to follow the money than the polls, regardless of which came first.
According to data from the Federal Election Commission, Black Bear PAC had spent $3.4 million in the current election cycle, as of March 31. Political action committees are looking for a return on investment. If a PAC dropping that much coin in West Virginia is switching targets, it’s probably not an arbitrary decision, or even a hunch.
So, in a way, campaign ads do perform a service other than fogging the mind with an all-out assault on rationality. Like just about everything else, the real devil is in the details, not the photo of a candidate that’s been altered to sport horns, a pointy beard, a barbed tail and a trident.
