A national anti-abortion group is redoubling its efforts to beat Sen. Kay Hagan (D-N.C.) with a new $620,000 TV ad buy in the Raleigh media market.
Women Speak Out PAC, an affiliate of the Susan B. Anthony List, will hit Hagan for opposing a law banning abortions after 20 weeks. A TV ad on the issue will air for 11 days starting Tuesday.
{mosads}“This hard-hitting television campaign is air support for our extensive ground game,” said Women Speak Out PAC President Marjorie Dannenfelser.
“To date, our field team has knocked on more than 104,000 doors and made more than 245,000 phone calls to turn out pro-life voters who don’t typically vote in midterm elections.”
Hagan is considered one of 2014’s most vulnerable Senate incumbents, though polls show that she holds a slight lead over Republican opponent Thom Tillis.
Women Speak Out PAC is hoping to convince voters who oppose abortion rights to become more engaged in the race.
The TV ad profiles a couple, Ned and Rebecca Ryun, who describe their daughter’s premature birth at 24 weeks. It first aired in June in a $100,000 campaign. (Ned Ryun is a conservative activist and the president of a Tea Party-affiliated group, American Majority.)
“Kay Hagan supports painful, late-term abortions. She’s too extreme for North Carolina,” a narrator says.
Hagan’s campaign criticized the Susan B. Anthony List as extreme for supporting Richard Mourdock, the former GOP Senate candidate in Indiana who said in 2012 that pregnancy from rape is “something that God intended to happen.”
Spokeswoman Sadie Weiner also called the group a tool of the conservative multibillionaire donors Charles and David Koch.
“This ad, from yet another Koch-affiliated group, is meant to distract voters from Tillis’ record of rejecting healthcare for women who need it, passing laws to reduce access to preventive care, and espousing fringe positions like saying the state has the authority to ban contraceptives,” Weiner in a statement.