Vulnerable Senate Dem Candidates Face Anti-Catholic Bigotry TV Spots

With a special focus on Ruben Gallego, a congressman with a far-left record running for the U.S. Senate in Arizona, conservative group Frontiers of Freedom Action is launching a new ad blitz (below) that attacks him and two other vulnerable Democrat candidates in the Southwest—including two endangered incumbent senators—for the Democrat Party’s extensive record of anti-Catholic bigotry.

The two-minute spot, which will air this week in both English and Spanish on local Arizona channels, with efforts also being made against Jackie Rosen in Nevada and Martin Heinrich in New Mexico, demands to know why Gallego has supported or otherwise sanctioned repeated instances of anti-Catholic bigotry in his party’s ranks.

In dramatic fashion, the information-laden, fact-heavy ad kicks off by highlighting Gallego’s “cruel war” against the Little Sisters of the Poor, noting his emphatic support in a prominent tweet supporting Xavier Becerra, the Biden-Harris administration’s Secretary of Health and Human Services who sought to force the group to violate their faith and pay for abortion pills. In its Nevada and New Mexico versions, the ad singles out Rosen and Heinrich as casting the winning votes to confirm Becerra.

George Landrith, president of Frontiers of Freedom, explained the ad’s potential to become a bombshell in the final weeks leading up to the November election. “Gallego is particularly vulnerable because of his far-left record. He is unsuitable for Arizona — but so too are Martin Heinrich in New Mexico and Jackie Rosen in Nevada,” Landrith said in a press release. “And when Hispanic voters—especially Hispanics who attend Catholic Mass—come to learn about their senator’s record of anti-Catholic bigotry, they are going to be stunned.”

“Republicans too often forget,” Landrith continued, “that even though many Hispanic voters are moving towards Trump, they are likely to vote for incumbent members of Congress just because they know their names. But they need to be shocked into realizing just how far left-wing they are—and particularly how anti-Catholic they are.”

“These spots are powerful and have shock value—and we are focused on broadcast news and daytime TV because many Hispanic mothers are particularly devoted to the Church, and Hispanic voters in general remember all the attacks and persecutions of the Church, as the ad says, in Mexico,” said Landrith.

Here, Landrith is referring to the end of the ad, during which the narrator states, “Viva Cristo Rey. Viva la Virgen de Guadalupe,” which translates to “Long live Christ the King. Long live the Virgin of Guadalupe” in English.

The spot takes aim at Gallego’s and other Democrats’ imposition of an “unconstitutional religious test” against Catholics nominated to serve on the U.S. Supreme Court and other roles within the federal judiciary—referring specifically to claims from Kamala Harris and other Democrats in the Senate Judiciary Committee that devotion to the Catholic faith prevents nominees from serving as federal judges.

Senate Democrats’ questioning of judicial nominees’ Catholic faith 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 catalogues 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 uphold the Church’s teachings on the sanctity of life.

“Ruben Gallego supported the Harris-Biden administration’s gender craziness—forcing Catholic schools to destroy women’s sports and allow men in women’s locker rooms,” the ad’s narrator states. The spot’s focus then shifts to Gallego’s support of Harris’s attempts to force Catholic healthcare providers to perform abortions, the Harris-Biden administration’s use of “SWAT team tactics” to jail peaceful pro-life activists, and the FBI’s infamous targeting of Catholics as potential terrorist threats.

“Gallego is a pro-abortion extremist, supporting unrestricted, up-to-the-moment of birth abortions paid for by taxpayers—and even voted against legislation that would protect newborn abortion survivors,” the narrator says.

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

“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 continues. “Latino Americans know from history that this must not happen here in America. Ask Ruben Gallego why he has supported so many bigoted, anti-Catholic measures. Ask Ruben Gallego why he won’t speak out against the anti-Catholic bigotry in the Democratic Party.”

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.

As the 2024 election season enters its final sprint, Kamala Harris is polling much closer to incumbents in Nevada and New Mexico than usual (Rosen’s and Heinrich’s Republican opponents have polled within single digits of their Democrat opponents in surveys this summer). While her campaign has faced some recent setbacks—including a poorly received CNN interview—her missteps have laid the groundwork for a strong environment for conservatives to make significant Senate gains in states that were initially expected to remain blue.

Of course, this will only happen if these issues are effectively highlighted. Whether it knows it or not, the Republican Party is sitting on a political goldmine. Should it choose to follow this ad’s lead and expose the anti-religious bigotry of the left for what it is and treat Democrats’ anti-Catholicism as a serious campaign issue this fall, it could very well find itself on the path to an unprecedented electoral majority.

Whether or not it chooses to do so in the waning days of campaign season, however, remains to be seen.

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