More taxes pls!
More taxes pls! screenshots from youtube

A few more facts about that hilariously bad anti-Manka Dhingra ad from yesterday:

First: I missed a recently filed report from the PAC that funded the ad, Eastside Values. They have indeed reported how much it cost them: $50,000. ("When we saw they dropped $50,000 to produce it, we expected a fucking seaplane," a Democratic operative working with a separate PAC in the same race told me.) Eastside Values reports spending $76,800 to run the ad on cable TV.

Second: It's not just local Republicans who are funding the ad buy. A few days before the state GOP gave $200,000 to Eastside Values, the state party received $500,000 from the Republican State Leadership Committee. The RSLC is a national group dedicated to electing Republicans to state-level offices. With control of the state legislature in the balance, national committees from both parties are pouring money into the race.

Finally: The firm that created the ad has used the same concept in another state.

To refresh, here's the anti-Dhingra ad:

And here's a pair of ads created by the same company during this year's Georgia Congressional race between Republican Karen Handel and Democrat Jon Ossoff:

As the anti-Dhingra ad paints her as a Seattle socialist, the Georgia ad characterized Ossoff as an out-of-touch California liberal. (Right down to people wearing generic pro-tax buttons in each spot.) The Ossoff ads were funded by the Congressional Leadership Fund, a PAC "exclusively dedicated to protecting and strengthening the Republican Majority in the House of Representative."

All three ads were created by FP1 Strategies, a Washington, D.C.-based ad agency. On its website, the agency promises that "utilizing demographic, geographic and psychographic targeting, we ensure the right message reaches the right people at the right time—and at the right cost."

FP1 Strategies includes the Georgia ads in a "special election case study". The firm worked in support of successful Republican campaigns in all three recent special elections: Montana, Georgia's 6th District, and Kansas' 4th District.

"The day after the first round of voting, we received a gift from the San Jose Mercury News," the firm writes about the Ossoff race. "The Bay-Area newspaper had done an analysis that showed Ossoff had raised more contributions from people in the San Francisco area than folks in Georgia. The ads, Thank You, Georgia and Golden Gate, defined Ossoff as a San Francisco liberal in the mold of Pelosi, and became two of the most discussed and celebrated spots of the special election season."

"A loss in any of these seats would have made GOP efforts to defend its House Majority and the Trump legislative agenda on Capitol Hill more difficult," the case study concludes later. "We also showed that Democratic candidates can wear the liberal uniform of their party and its activists by connecting the candidates to the governing resistance and Nancy Pelosi’s out-of-the-mainstream agenda. No GOP consulting firm played a bigger role than FP1 Strategies in helping to secure these victories in these high-profile elections."