The Fighting 29th

All about New York's 29th Congressional District

MoveOn has posted the second anti-Kuhl ad it plans to show in the 29th. Titled "Red-Handed Defense", it alleges that Kuhl accepted money from defense contractor PACs and opposed penalties for contractors "at a time when soldiers didn't have enough body armor".  It ends with the tagline "Tom Delay, Dick Cheney and now Randy Kuhl, another Republican caught red-handed".

The Gannett News Service reports today that Kuhl will ask the Elmira and Rochester TV stations to pull the MoveOn ads because of "factual errors".  The same story calculates the total spend for the ads as $100,000, not $76,000 as was initially reported by the AP.

Though the Elmira Star-Gazette featured the story on their website, the Rochester Democrat and Chronicle, another Gannett paper, cut the story to three graphs,  buried it on page 5B of the print edition, and did not carry it on their site.

Randy Kuhl will be one of three incumbent Republican congressmen targeted by MoveOn.org's newest ad campaign.  The ad shows a truck dumping money in the desert while the narrator asks what happened to the $300 billion spent in Iraq, and points out that Kuhl has voted for all of the Iraq spending bills.  It ends by portraying Kuhl in grainy black-and-white with an airbrushed "red hand".

MoveOn's media buy in the 29th is 700 gross points, which, according to this reference, means that the average television viewer in the district will see the ad seven times.  A similar ad will also be aired in New Hampshire's 2nd and New York's 20th districts, which, like the 29th, are also rated "lean Republican" by the Cook Political Report.

MoveOn ran another similar ad in four other districts in June.  One of those districts, Indiana's 2nd, was moved from "lean Republican" to "toss up" by Cook in his latest report.

Update:  According to the AP, MoveOn is spending $76,000 on those ads in the 29th.  That's equal to almost half of the cash Massa had on hand at the end of June. 

Eric Massa's stem cell press conference was an interesting example of the difficulty of penetrating the Rochester media market.  Massa's press conference was held at 10:30 a.m., which early enough to make the 6 o'clock news.  However, it didn't make any of the three major network newscasts that evening.  (I watched one and recorded two.)  It might have made the one-hour pre-news newscasts, but it wasn't a "top story" for the day.

Since Rochester sits at the confluence of four congressional districts, a Member of Congress has to do something special to make the evening news.  During the 6 o'clock newscasts, ads for the well-financed fight in the 26th district were the only time congressional candidates from any district were mentioned.  The other political ads were utilized by Mrs. Clinton and Mr. Spitzer to help cement their 60+% leads, proving yet again that you can never be too rich, too thin, or win too big.

Since at least half of the registered voters in the 29th live in the Rochester media market, getting on the tube is important to both candidates.  Judging from this media event, it will take more than a press release and a news conference.