Breaking News Emails
Get breaking news alerts and special reports. The news and stories that matter, delivered weekday mornings.
Oct. 29, 2018 / 4:34 PM GMT
By Dartunorro Clark
President Donald Trump’s re-election campaign on Monday released a national ad billed as a “closing sale” to voters to bolster support for Republicans ahead of the midterms.
The $6 million, 60-second spot touts a booming economy under Trump’s watch interspersed with flashbacks to the 2008 economic crisis inherited by President Barack Obama. The ad warns voters that the success “could all go away if we don’t remember where we came from.”
The ad features a working mother thinking back to that economic recession and contemplating “how far we’ve come.”
Trump, who has consistently made the midterm elections a referendum on his presidency, does not appear in the ad.
Fact checkers, including NBC News, have noted that Trump inherited a booming economy with low unemployment and steady job growth from his predecessor. The economy was struggling when Obama took office in 2009, but he was able to turn it around in the first years of his presidency.
The ad will run on national broadcast and cable TV networks as well as online through Election Day, a Trump campaign press release said.
Meanwhile, in Florida, Sen. Kamala Harris, D-Calif., and former Attorney General Eric Holder held a get-out-the-vote rally Monday morning with Democratic gubernatorial candidate Andrew Gillum in Broward and Miami-Dade counties, the state’s two most populous counties. Gillum, the mayor of Tallahassee, is running a heated race against the Trump-backed GOP candidate, former Rep. Ron DeSantis.
As the rally was wrapping up, Trump blasted Gillum as a “thief” on Twitter, a claim for which he provided no evidence. Gillum hit back in short order, calling Trump “weak.”
During the rally, Harris hammered Trump for his boasts about the economy.
“In this economy, we have a situation that is not working for working people, let’s speak that truth,” she told the crowd. “There are those that want to talk about ‘oh the economy is great, the economy is great’ … Well, how do you measure that greatness?”
She said she’s met people who are working two to three jobs, so “don’t tell me the economy is working for everybody, it is not.”
She also framed the election as a fight against bigotry and hatred after an apparent white nationalist opened fire at a Pittsburgh synagogue and a Florida man allegedly sent pipe bomb packages to several of Trump’s critics, including Harris.
“Racism, anti-Semitism, sexism, and homophobia are real in this country,” she said.
“The stakes could not be higher in these next eight days,” Harris added. “This is an inflection moment in the history of our country … this is a moment in time that I think to be similar to the moment in time when my parents met, when they were active in the Civil Rights movement.”
Rep. Beto O’Rourke, D-Texas, running in a closely watched Senate race against Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, also spoke out against political-motivated violence in the country on Monday during a campaign event in Amarillo, Texas.
