A Republican super PAC trying to influence a crucial Senate race in Maine spent thousands of dollars running an attack ad in the wrong Portland, targeting voters thousands of miles away in Oregon.
An ad funded by the super PAC, Defending Main Street, assailing Troy Jackson, the Democratic nominee in Maine, was shown to more than a million viewers in Oregon and over 300,000 others in Washington State from Thursday to Sunday, according to Google’s advertising data.
The super PAC’s chief financial officer, Sarah Chamberlain, pinned the blunder, which cost $25,900, entirely on its ad-buying vendor, Cross Screen Media. She added that the vendor had pulled the ads, which ran on YouTube, and began a new campaign targeting Mr. Jackson in Maine.
“Defending Main Street had nothing to do with this,” Ms. Chamberlain said in an interview before mentioning 1903 Group, the vendor’s parent company. “They screwed up.”
A spokesman for 1903 Group confirmed the mistake. He said the money had been refunded to the super PAC, which said in a statement that no donor funds would be lost because of the error.
The ad, titled “So Many Taxes,” says that Mr. Jackson supports raising taxes — a line of attack that Senator Susan Collins, a Republican seeking a sixth term, has repeatedly used in her re-election campaign. Ms. Collins is not named in the ad.
“It’s tough to make a living when you pay so much in taxes,” a narrator says in the video. “And taxin’ Troy Jackson made it that way.”
Mr. Jackson has countered that he supports tax increases only on wealthy individuals and large corporations.
People took to social media on Monday morning to share how bizarre it was to have seen the ad in Oregon. Later in the day, the Google listing for the ad appeared to have been fixed, to show ZIP codes in Maine.
Ms. Collins’s campaign did not respond to a request for comment. Dan Gottlieb, a spokesman for Mr. Jackson’s campaign, seized on the ad mix-up, saying Ms. Collins and “her allies are so out of touch with Maine, they apparently can’t find it on a map.”
Some campaigns intentionally target national audiences to build broader momentum. Ads supporting James Talarico, the Democratic Senate nominee in Texas, were shown nationwide in the same period, Google’s ad data showed. But the Maine ad was a pure mistake.
The money spent on the anti-Jackson ads in the Portland, Ore., market paled to the $946,500 that the super PAC recently paid for television and streaming ads opposing Mr. Jackson, according to Federal Election Commission filings.
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