Club for Growth launches anti-Biden ad blitz
The conservative group will spend $5 million on ads across three battleground states next week.
Club for Growth's new ad says Joe Biden would hurt students with his opposition to emergency parental choice grants. | Ethan Miller/Getty Images
By Alex Isenstadt
Updated: 08/06/2020 10:51 AM EDT
The anti-tax Club for Growth is launching a multimillion dollar ad campaign going after Joe Biden, as Republicans find themselves overwhelmed by liberal outside groups in the presidential race.
The conservative organization is preparing a $5 million advertising campaign attacking the former vice president for opposing school choice. Officials with the group say the investment could grow in the weeks to come. The commercials will start on Monday and air for a week in three key swing states: Arizona, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.
President Donald Trump has been swamped by liberal outside groups in recent weeks. According to outside spending data tallied by the Center for Responsive Politics, pro-Biden groups have outspent their conservative counterparts more than two to one, $91.2 million to $44.7 million. The White House-sanctioned pro-Trump super PAC, America First Action, has also been outraised and outspent by its main Democratic counterpart, Priorities USA Action.
The Club took an anti-Trump posture during the 2016 Republican primary, though it has since refashioned itself as a pro-Trump outfit. Former GOP Rep. David McIntosh, the organization's president, has been in touch with Trump, and the president recently helped persuade McIntosh to cease attack ads against Rep. Roger Marshall (R-Kan.), who became the GOP's Senate nominee in Kansas this week.
The Club has been vocal about its support for more schooling options for parents amid the coronavirus pandemic, which threatens to shutter schools this fall, and strategists with the group view it as an issue that could sway voters. The new ad says Biden would hurt students with his opposition to emergency parental choice grants.
"A lost year is unacceptable, but four – under Biden – that's a lost generation," the ad says.
Biden spokesman Andrew Bates pointed to a recent plan the former vice president released on how to safely reopen schools.
"Donald Trump's disastrous mismanagement of the coronavirus response is the top roadblock stopping schools from re-opening," Bates said, "and just like with every other dimension of this crisis, Joe Biden has been leading while Donald Trump has been failing."
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