Campaign

Gravel campaign to air Biden attack ad on MSNBC

by Chris Mills Rodrigo - 07/11/19 1:31 PM ET

Former Sen. Mike Gravel’s (D-Alaska) presidential campaign announced Thursday they will run an ad attacking fellow Democratic White House hopeful Joe Biden on MSNBC Friday.

The first ad purchased by Gravel cuts together clips of Biden, a former vice president and senator who is the crowded field’s front-runner, defending prior positions on the war in Iraq, criminal justice and reproductive rights.

{mosads}“I served with Biden in the Senate – he’s dead wrong on many issues that have serious human consequences. His ideology is just off the rail,” Gravel said in a statement.

The spot will run during Friday’s episode of “Deadline,” MSNBC’s fifth-highest rated show, which averaged 1.4 million daily viewers in the last quarter.

It will also air locally on five TV stations in Cedar Rapids and Des Moines, Iowa.

“Our goal has always been to draw attention to the flaws of centrists like Joe Biden who masquerade as ‘progressives’ and peddle a made-up argument of ‘electability,’” campaign manager David Oks said.

“Senator Gravel called out Biden for his right-wing policies in the 2008 debates and is prepared to do so again in the July debate. If a few Iowans see this and discover that Biden is hardly a Democrat or that his flip-flopping makes him an incredibly vulnerable potential nominee, and we see his poll numbers go down in a few weeks, this will have been a success.”

Gravel is just short of the donor threshold to qualify for the second round of Democratic presidential debates later this month, his campaign added.

The campaign touted amassing 8,000 new donors in the last two days following a “mutual fundraising effort” with Marianne Williamson. Another similar effort is planned with entrepreneur Andrew Yang’s campaign.

The press release for Gravel’s ad, however, misspelled the former Alaska senator’s name as “Gavel,” a mistake the campaign owned.

“lol that was a funny typo. live and learn,” tweeted the campaign, which is managed by Oks, who just graduated high school, and Henry Williams, a rising sophomore at Columbia University.