MN TV Station Pulls Attack Ads Against Mills

Stewart Mills Photo Credit: Flicker
Stewart Mills Photo Credit: Flicker

A television station in the Twin Cities pulled an advertisement against Minnesota congressional candidate Stewart Mills after a complaint from the National Republican Congressional Committee (NRCC) said the ad was inaccurate.

Democrat Representative Nancy Pelosi’s super PAC, House Majority PAC produced the commercial. It shows Mills saying that he is “personally offended” about allegations that the wealthy don’t pay taxes.  The National Republican Congressional Committee claim that the words were deceptively strung together from three separate sentences from a longer speech.

In the Twin Cities, WUCW-TV’s director of sales said in a letter to the Mills campaign that the station’s legal department advised that the ad be pulled off the air.

NRCC spokesperson Bob Salera said on the committee website, “With nothing new to attack Republican candidate Stewart Mills on, House Majority PAC opted instead to recycle an old DCCC (Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee) lie about Mills’s stance on taxes that has already been thoroughly debunked by Minnesota Public Radio.”

Mills gave the speech in the Summer of 2013 to a Second Amendment and Liberty Rally which was posted on YouTube.  Mills said in the video, “We donate to charity, we help with events, we do a lot of things for this community and to be singled out as a deadbeat is personally offensive.  And that’s what they call them.  They say ‘oh, they’re not paying their fair share.  There’s all these loopholes.'”

Mills later goes on to say, “The problem with that isn’t necessarily paying your fair-share, it’s the political pandering because what happens is that underneath the Obama administration, our taxes went from 35 to 39.6 percent.”

In a recent Star Tribune article, it says that some political observers have called Mills challenger, incumbent Rick Nolan “the most vulnerable Democrat in the house” for this election cycle.

This marks the third network to pull an ad containing deceptively edited footage and false claims about Mills.  In 2014,  two networks pulled a similar ad during the election cycle after being proven false by fact checkers.

The NRCC posted a statement on their website that said, ““Democrats are pressing the panic button in Minnesota’s 8th District, calling in Nancy Pelosi’s Super PAC to attempt to keep Rick Nolan’s campaign afloat by airing already debunked lies about Stewart Mills’s stance on taxes. Try as they might, misleading ads from Rick Nolan’s Super PAC allies won’t distract Minnesotans from Rick Nolan’s extreme record on national security that makes our country less safe.”

The ad was part of a $350,000 advertising campaign by the progressive House Majority PAC in both the Twin Cities and Duluth television markets.  The ad, however, is still running on other stations.

Last week, in reviewing congressional races across the country, The Hill called Congressman Nolan “the most vulnerable Democrat in the country.”

Donna Azarian