Republican Senate nominee Ed Gillepsie’s campaign is looking to get some mileage (or maybe it’s traction) out of last week’s story [1] in which it is estimated that 250,000 Virginians could lose their existing health insurance plans. The result is an ad that features the old video Mark Warner’s people tried to disappear [2] as the campaign got underway:
Not a lot of content from Gillespie aside from talking points — Warner does the heavy lifting against himself here — but the visuals are striking, so kudos to the art director.
I still maintain that the Gillespie campaign has, so far, been a touch above moribund. One likes to think there is a strategy behind this and perhaps there is…something along the lines of the waning days of the Cuccinelli gubernatorial campaign, when he hammered Obamacare mercilessly on the campaign trail and came close to upending Terry McAuliffe.
It’s a tested approach and there is reason to believe it can succeed. But unlike Cuccinelli, Gillespie remains unknown [3] to roughly two-thirds of the electorate. That is the campaign’s major, enduring problem. A single ad cannot change it. But this ad does show that there is life in the Republican effort. The question is: what’s the follow-up? And how soon will it come? Tick tock…