Anti-Catholic Bigotry TV Spots Hit Ohio’s Brown and Penn’s Casey in Five-State Push

Going after vulnerable Senate Democrats for their party’s well-established record of anti-Catholic bigotry, a conservative PAC is expanding its TV presence into the crucial and close Senate races in Ohio and Pennsylvania as part of its push against endangered Democrat Senate candidates. This means the ads (Ohio-English, Ohio-Spanish, Pennsylvania-English, Pennsylvania-Spanish)—which have been heavily played in Arizona—will air this week and next in a total of five battleground states.

The president of the PAC, George Landrith, said in a statement that the PAC is doubling its expenditures in Arizona, where he says there has been a strong response to its recent ad campaign there, which has resulted in additional resources to expand the ad into additional states—including the close Senate battleground states of Ohio and Pennsylvania. “The big news is we are now moving east and doing English and Hispanic broadcasts against Bob Casey in Pennsylvania and Sherrod Brown in Ohio. There are 60,000 Hispanics in Columbus, where we are advertising in Ohio, and half a million in Philadelphia, where we are on Spanish TV,” Landrith said.

“All of this has been made possible,” Landrith continued, because “we had a tremendous response to both our Spanish-language and English-language ads in the largest nightly news slots in Phoenix, where viewers sometimes saw our two-minute ad twice in the same news hour. This meant we were taking up a remarkable four minutes of a news broadcast.”

“We are in the same news slot this week as well on Hispanic TV in Phoenix, in heavily watched nightly news programs. We also hit Spanish media in New Mexico and Nevada, and we are now extending those efforts against Rosen and Heinrich,” said Landrith in reference to endangered Democrat incumbents Jacky Rosen (D-NV) and Martin Heinrich (D-NM).

“Our whole point has been that many Mexican-Americans remember the persecution of the Church, and so we have emphasized that in the Southwest,” he continued. “Our ads also talk about the persecution of the Church in many Hispanic countries, including Venezuela, Cuba, and Nicaragua. That’s why we think Hispanic voters in Ohio and Pennsylvania, as well as Catholic voters, will be outraged by the records of the two incumbents in failing to respond to anti-Catholic bigotry in their party.”

Landrith also explained the potential importance of the ads in close Senate races. “Both Brown and Casey are either tied with or behind their Republican opponents and are trying to escape their far-left voting records. Brown is particularly vulnerable because he’s trying to separate himself from the extremist left-wing record he has established and is now busy saying he’s not going to do that anymore. Meanwhile, Casey, who was once pro-life and Catholic, has all the same problems that Brown and the other candidates have with their party’s record of anti-Catholic bigotry and his failure to stand up to it or denounce it,” Landrith said. “Bernie Moreno has been running an effective campaign in Ohio, and David McCormick is an attractive candidate with a well-financed campaign in Pennsylvania.”

The information-laden, fact-heavy ad kicks off by highlighting each Democrat candidate’s “cruel war” against the Little Sisters of the Poor. It notes that the senators provided the deciding votes in the Senate confirmation of Biden-Harris Secretary of Health and Human Services Xavier Becerra, a key player in the left’s persecution of the Catholic group.

“Sherrod Brown joined the Democratic Party’s cruel war against them by giving the winning vote to the 23 Attorney Generals trying to force the sisters to violate their faith and pay for abortion pills,” the ad’s narrator states in the Ohio version of the TV spot.

The ad also notes prominent Democrat senators’ attempts to impose an “unconstitutional religious test” against Catholics nominated to serve on the U.S. Supreme Court and other roles within the federal judiciary—a move that caused even prominent secular figures—including the president of Princeton University—to speak out. In September 2017, Princeton president Christopher L. Eisgruber issued an unprecedented letter to Democrats on the Senate Judiciary Committee, urging them to “refrain from interrogating nominees about the religious or spiritual foundations of their jurisprudential views.” The president of the University of Notre Dame, the Harvard Law Review, and the Anti-Defamation League echoed Eisgruber’s sentiment, also releasing statements condemning the rhetoric.

The ad then goes on to catalog some of the progressive left’s most shocking acts of anti-Catholic prejudice—from their embrace of transgender ideology to their flagrant persecution of Catholics who assent to the Church’s teachings on the sanctity of life.

The ad also makes note of Kamala Harris’s and Joe Biden’s celebration of the so-called “Transgender Day of Visibility” on Easter Sunday, the holiest day of the year for Christians, as well as their administration’s initial refusal to allow the Knights of Columbus to celebrate a Memorial Day Mass at Arlington National Cemetery.

The Arizona, Nevada, and New Mexico iterations of the ad aired in both English and Spanish on local channels, focusing on the anti-Catholic stances of Ruben Gallego in Arizona, Jackie Rosen in Nevada, and Martin Heinrich in New Mexico.

The ads conclude with a direct appeal to Latino and Hispanic voters. “Latino American families remember—Latino Americans remember—how evil governments in Mexico, Cuba, Nicaragua, and Venezuela hated the Church and Catholics, and how they persecuted priests, nuns, and laypeople,” the ad’s narrator states. “Latino Americans know from history that this must not happen here in America.

With this latest ad blitz, Frontiers of Freedom is imitating a series of ads from the 2022 midterm election cycle taking aim at the left’s extremism and the “chosen candidates” of the Democrat Party machine and corporate media apparatus—even as most GOP consultants spent major GOP cash on running ineffective ads that neglected to target the well-documented records of extremism of most Democrat candidates.

The 2022 ads, which targeted five incumbent Senate Democrats in New York, Arizona, New Hampshire, Connecticut, and Nevada, alleged that the media is “the most powerful and corrupt institution in America” that seeks to “smear” GOP candidates and protect their own “chosen candidates,” asking voters to “send a message to the media bosses” who are corrupting American journalism and give them a “miserable election night.”

The 2022 ads sought to exploit Schumer’s watershed failure to stand up to the primary threats against him and other senators, as well as his decision to force his colleagues to greenlight the Biden-Harris agenda, from inflationary spending to the federal takeover of elections.

Additionally, the ad noted how attempts by the likes of Harris, Biden, and Senate Democrats to push a radical takeover of elections—as well as efforts by other Democrats to alter the makeup of the U.S. Supreme Court, the U.S. Senate, American citizenship, and the Electoral College—represent a “scorched-earth, rule-or-ruin” attack on longstanding American democratic institutions.

The 2022 ad blitz first drew national attention when it was hailed by one conservative news outlet as the “greatest campaign ad of all time.” The Arizona media similarly credited the spot for “reviving” Republican senatorial candidate Blake Masters’s campaign in Arizona. The ad has since been featured by the New Hampshire Journal and was tweeted by former House Speaker Newt Gingrich.

This cycle, Senate candidates Bernie Moreno (R-OH) and Tim Sheehy (R-MT) have been using terms like “extremist” and “liberal” in the vein of the 2022 ad, instead of the usual Senate GOP failure to make the broader ideological case against the progressive left.

Although statewide polling indicates that Brown and Casey have thus far managed to hold a slight edge over their Republican challengers, the expansion of the ad campaign into their electoral territory could go a long way in further tightening the race and compelling Catholics, moderates, independents, and other disaffected Democrats to reconsider their support for their incumbent left-wing senators.

Aaron Flanigan is the pen name of a writer in Washington, D.C.