The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
By: Greg Bluestein
Senate candidate Jon Ossoff’s latest TV ad hammers Sen. David Perdue on the same issue that helped President-elect Joe Biden capture Georgia: A message that Donald Trump and other Republicans downplayed the coronavirus pandemic with disastrous consequences.
The 30-second TV ad released Monday features audio clips of Perdue and Trump sounding dismissive of the virus as a graph shows the disease’s death toll around the nation topping 240,000.
“David Perdue ignored the medical experts, downplayed the crisis and left us unprepared,” a narrator says.
Ossoff has battered the first-term Republican for months over his response to the pandemic while highlighting his wife’s job as a physician. Perdue has countered by emphasizing his votes for programs that helped blunt the pandemic’s economic fallout by supporting more than a million Georgia jobs.
Perdue spokesman John Burke said it was a “recycled” attack and accused Senate Democrats of “holding up additional COVID-19 relief that Senator Perdue is fighting to bring to Georgia.”
With control of the U.S. Senate at stake in the Jan. 5 runoffs, Ossoff and other Democrats are leaning more aggressively into raising the pandemic as a campaign issue, even as a surge in new cases refocuses the nation’s attention toward the still-raging crisis.
The TV ads play an outsized role in the cliffhanger campaigns. Much of the battle between the four rivals – U.S. Sen. Kelly Loeffler faces Democrat Raphael Warnock in the other contest – will play out on the airwaves. More than $76 million has already been spent or reserved on airtime through the votes.
Watch the ad, “Echo,” here:
