Exclusive: Priorities USA launches new ad campaign targeting McConnell entitlement talk
Heidi Przybyla
Sen. Majority Leader Mitch McConnell is quickly becoming the vessel for the Democratic Party’s closing argument to midterm voters, a push punctuated by a new ad shared with NBC News.
Priorities USA Action, the largest Democratic Party super PAC, is launching on a $2 million national television campaign Thursday highlighting the Kentucky Republican’s comments blaming entitlement programs like Social Security and Medicare for the rising federal debt despite two decades worth of tax cuts.
"The Republicans just admitted it," says the ad, titled "Big Cuts," which will run through Election Day.
"They’re going to make you pay for their massive tax giveaway to big corporations and the wealthy. AFTER the election," the ad says.
Last week, McConnell gave interviews to Bloomberg and Reuters in which he said entitlements are the “real drivers of the debt” and called for them to be paired “to the demographics of the future.”
On Tuesday night, House minority leader Nancy Pelosi sent a "Dear Colleague" letter to her members reminding them to keep their focus on health care in the aftermath of McConnell’s remarks. "Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security and the Affordable Care Act are on the ballot," said Pelosi. Further, "Over 130 million Americans with pre-existing conditions are at risk, and they need to know the truth," said Pelosi.
Democrats this week are also seizing on a report detailing a nearly dollar-for-dollar balance between two decades of tax cuts benefiting the wealthiest 1 percent and proposed GOP spending cuts to the nation’s social safety net programs. Read more about that here.
Two weeks before the election, McConnell’s comments, say Democrats, have allowed them a final chance to break through with messaging they’ve been trying for months to advance.
"Mitch McConnell helped frame the incredibly high stakes of this election," Priorities USA Action Chairman Guy Cecil said in a statement to NBC News.
In his interviews, McConnell said the programs would not be cut unless both parties agreed to changes.
"We all know that there will be no solution to that, short of some kind of bipartisan grand bargain that makes the very, very popular entitlement programs be in a position to be sustained. That hasn’t happened since the ‘80s," McConnell told Reuters on Oct. 17. "But at some point we will have to sit down on a bipartisan basis and address the long-term drivers of the debt."
According to a Washington Post fact check, some Democrats have gone so far in their ads as to claim that Republicans want to actually get rid of Social Security and Medicare. According to the Post Fact Checker, "That’s false. Every time Republicans have tried to alter these programs without Democratic buy-in, they have paid a political price at the polls. That’s why McConnell says there needs to be a bipartisan solution."
Priorities USA Action has already been running digital ads in dozens of House, Senate and gubernatorial races around the country highlighting the Republican plan to cut Medicare, Social Security, and Medicaid to pay for new tax cuts for the wealthy and big corporations.
Looming cuts to Medicare and Social Security is a message that proved potent in 2006, the last Democratic wave election, after then-President George W. Bush formed a commission to study privatizing Social Security.
"It’s a pretty straightforward equation and we should not be confused about it," President Obama said at a early voting rally in Nevada on Monday.
"I don’t know how much simpler it can be. If you believe that folks like me need a tax cut and folks like your grandma needs a cut in her Social Security, then you’re right, you should just sit home and not vote."