Crossroads and Obamacare

Maeve Reston reports at The Los Angeles Times:

The big-spending conservative group American Crossroads and its nonprofit arm launched a new offensive Tuesday in the 2014 campaign for control of the U.S. Senate with an ad targeting North Carolina Sen. Kay Hagan and her support of the Affordable Care Act.

The ad is the first in a $10-million campaign by the nonprofit Crossroads GPS and its sister "super PAC" American Crossroads that will target vulnerable Democrats this summer in four key states: Arkansas, Alaska, North Carolina and Colorado. The spot features Hagan echoing President Obama’s promise that if Americans liked their healthcare plans, they could keep them, and highlights the fact that thousands of North Carolina health insurance plans were canceled because they did not meet the requirements of the new law.

“Typical Washington. Deceiving us. Pushing their agenda,” the narrator in the new Crossroads GPS ad says, “Tell Senator Hagan: Keep your word on our health care.”

The ad is just the latest salvo in what campaign advertising analyst Elizabeth Wilner calls “a four-year avalanche” of ads maligning the Affordable Care Act even though polls show that public opinion has essentially hardened on the law.

From its passage in March 2010 through this April, opponents of the Affordable Care Act spent $418 million on negative ads about the law, while proponents spent just $27 million to tout their support, according to an analysis by Kantar Media’s Campaign Media Analysis Group, which Wilner oversees. That means the law’s opponents have spent $15 for every $1 spent by supporters of Obamacare.