Senate candidate Jon Ossoff’s latest TV ad hammers Sen. David Perdue on the same issue that helped President-elect Joe Biden capture Georgia: A message that Donald Trump and other Republicans downplayed the coronavirus pandemic with disastrous consequences.

The 30-second TV ad released Monday features audio clips of Perdue and Trump sounding dismissive of the virus as a graph shows the disease’s death toll around the nation topping 240,000.

“David Perdue ignored the medical experts, downplayed the crisis and left us unprepared,” a narrator says.

Ossoff has battered the first-term Republican for months over his response to the pandemic while highlighting his wife’s job as a physician. Perdue has countered by emphasizing his votes for programs that helped blunt the pandemic’s economic fallout by supporting more than a million Georgia jobs.

Perdue spokesman John Burke said it was a “recycled” attack and accused Senate Democrats of “holding up additional COVID-19 relief that Senator Perdue is fighting to bring to Georgia.”

With control of the U.S. Senate at stake in the Jan. 5 runoffs, Ossoff and other Democrats are leaning more aggressively into raising the pandemic as a campaign issue, even as a surge in new cases refocuses the nation’s attention toward the still-raging crisis.

The TV ads play an outsized role in the cliffhanger campaigns. Much of the battle between the four rivals – U.S. Sen. Kelly Loeffler faces Democrat Raphael Warnock in the other contest – will play out on the airwaves. More than $76 million has already been spent or reserved on airtime through the votes.

Watch the ad, “Echo," here:

About the Author

Featured

Atlanta Police Chief Darin Schierbaum, accompanied by Atlanta Fire Chief Roderick Smith, provided an update to the press during a media tour at the Atlanta Public Safety Training Center. They discussed the new Simulation Center, which will enable officers to train for various crime scenarios, including domestic disputes, commercial robberies, and kidnappings. Tuesday, Dec. 17, 2024.
(Miguel Martinez / AJC)

Credit: Miguel Martinez-Jimenez/AJC