It has been more than three weeks since Election Day and Democrats in North Carolina have mulled and analyzed the reasons for their failures—from the drag on the ticket by President Obama to Republican gerrymandering to events beyond their control such as ISIS and Ebola.
And now, former Democrat political consultant and current communications adviser Thomas Mills has made a frank assessment in a post on his PoliticsNC blog. He says easily debunked campaign ads may have hurt his party’s candidates.
Media coverage and analysis focused on money spent on TV ads in the U.S. Senate race between Democrat Sen. Kay Hagan and Republican challenger Thom Tillis. But Mills says many—if not most—voters looked elsewhere to find accurate information about the candidates.
He sees a trend in which citizens don’t just accept what they’re spoon-fed in relentless, contradictory TV ads, but they instead explore for themselves candidates’ positions on the issues.
“In the Walmart moms focus group in Charlotte in mid-October, a group of mainly undecided women voters knew very little about Tillis or Hagan despite almost $100 million in ads,” Mills says. “Several women said they would go online to learn more about the candidates before they voted.”
Mills cited three examples that Republicans repeatedly refuted throughout the campaign season.
The first was the charge in a Hagan ad that Tillis, as speaker of the North Carolina House, cut $500 million from the state’s education budget. That claim was found to be “mostly false” in a “truth check” by TV station WYFF in Greenville, S.C., which also covers western North Carolina.
The Tampa Bay Times’ Politifact said the ad was “literally false,” but rated Hagan’s claim as “half true,” because Republicans allegedly didn’t increase education spending enough to maintain the status quo.
The second example was the allegation Republicans would allow Duke Energy to pass the costs of cleaning up the Dan River coal ash spill to its ratepayers instead of to its shareholders. WRAL in Raleigh determined an ad by NC Families First against state Sen. Chad Barefoot was false and said another ad that targeted Tillis had problems, too.
The third Democrat campaign falsehood Mills said was a problem was the claim Republicans raised taxes on 80 percent of North Carolinians as they implemented reforms. That one was debunked as untrue by the Washington Post, FactCheck.org and WRAL.
