An outside group supporting Senator Mitch McConnell is spending nearly $1 million over the next week to run ads attacking his opponent on the immigration issue.
While immigration hasn’t been a major topic of focus in the Senate race between McConnell and Democrat Alison Lundergan Grimes, the ads accuse Grimes of backing legislation that would lead to “citizenship for millions who broke the law.”
The ads were first reported by Politico.
The group behind the ad buy is the Kentucky Opportunity Coalition, a 501(c) (4) nonprofit that has already spent millions on ads attacking Grimes on the issues of coal and the Affordable Care Act.
The latest ads feature black-and-white video footage of people hopping a fence to enter the U.S. illegally, and follow last month’s Kentucky Farm Bureau forum, when Grimes said she would have supported a comprehensive immigration reform bill that McConnell voted against.
At the forum, Grimes said she believed in creating an “earned pathway to citizenship”, and that McConnell’s vote against the measure helped create “the crisis we see at the border today.”
"Mitch McConnell voted against immigration reform that would have helped Kentucky farmers and secured our border by putting thousands more agents on the border," said Grimes spokeswoman Charly Norton. "Alison opposes President Obama in any attempt to alter our immigration system by executive order and believes Congress needs to do its job and pass comprehensive immigration reform."
McConnell says Congress should approach immigration reform piecemeal, breaking it up into several smaller bills.
The Grimes campaign recently releasedan ad which features the Democratic candidate skeet shooting. In the ad, Grimes lists a set of issues in which she disagrees with President Obama.
“I’m not Barack Obama," says Grimes in the commercial. "I disagree with him on guns, coal and the EPA.”
