Wave of GOP ads to roll in

Ten weeks ahead of the June 8 primary, New York investment banker John Chachas today joined the top crop of candidates using campaign commercials to bring their personal stories into Nevadans’ homes — and to make the case for why they deserve your vote.

Next up: most likely going on the attack as Election Day nears and contenders work to convince the smaller, largely conservative GOP electorate that they’re tougher than their opponents and tough enough to beat the Democrat Reid in November, say campaign strategists and political analysts.

"Now, the candidates are defining themselves before someone else defines them. Eventually, they’ll get into the negative ads," said David Ryfe, a University of Nevada, Reno journalism professor who specializes in political communication. "In a primary, you’re mainly going to get voters who are pretty passionate partisans looking for the true conservative" in the GOP contest.

Former state Sen. Sue Lowden is the current Republican front-runner thanks, in part, to launching on Feb. 2 the earliest radio and TV ads of the GOP field. That allowed her to leave the dozen-strong competition in the dust — for now. The strategy also opened her up to strong verbal and e-mail attacks, mostly from the No. 2 Republican, Danny Tarkanian, but also from Reid’s campaign.

Lowden’s strategy to break out fast with four TV and radio ads gave her the imprint of the anointed GOP candidate at a cost of some $250,000. The other top primary competitors waited until March to follow, husbanding resources for the primary endgame expected to see media spending skyrocket.

Tarkanian, a businessman and former UNLV basketball star, was up second with a TV ad, touting himself as the non-establishment candidate. A second TV spot criticizes a plan to use $3.4 million in federal stimulus funding to pay for a tunnel in Florida to protect turtles from freeway traffic.

The project is "just another example of how billions in bailouts and pork are spending America into oblivion," Tarkanian said in the ad, appealing to voters concerned about the federal government’s spending.

Jamie Fisfis, a Tarkanian campaign consultant, said the media buys will increase until the primary, and he is certain his candidate will be able to raise the millions of dollars needed to pay for the ads.

"We’ll never have less from here on out in terms of what people are hearing from us. And we’ll make sure our fundraising is going to match what we want to do," said Fisfis, who explained the campaign is trying to be efficient by targeting conservative talk show and TV audiences.

Asked whether the ads will go negative at some point, Fisfis said, "I expect all the candidates to get engaged with each other. We make those decisions week to week."

The campaign manager for Chachas delivered the same message.

"He’s no shrinking violet," Ryan Erwin said. "If somebody lashes out at him, he’ll come back."

Chachas today launched two TV spots, one biographical and one focused on his business experience, both meant to introduce him to Nevadans who might be thinking "John who?"

Chachas has got a long way to go to distinguish himself from the GOP pack because the Ely native has lived out of state for the past couple decades and is nearly unknown. But he has got the money to make his case, tapping his GOP fundraising friends and spending his own millions.

His first TV ad buy is large, between $150,000 and $200,000 to run two commercials in rotation through mid-April. They are running on the major networks but also are targeted heavily toward cable TV in rural Nevada such as CNN and the conservative Fox News, Erwin said.

The ad focused on Chachas’ biography notes the first-time candidate is a member of a Greek immigrant ranching family in White Pine County with deep rural roots. The second commercial touts the former banker’s financial credentials, saying he could help pull the state out of its economic crisis.

"He’s the legitimate outsider, and there’s no one else in this race that has experience in the global economy," said Erwin, echoing the main points of the ads. "To date John has been the dark horse question mark. But with these ads, I think you’ll start to see him engage. The truth is every candidate in this race is worried about what John Chachas is going to do."

Former Reno Assemblywoman Sharron Angle’s campaign said it began last week gathering footage for a TV ad but did not have any immediate plans for when it might air.

Angle, who has the purest conservative credentials based on her no-tax, strict-constitutionalist voting record, has a loyal base of support in rural and Northern Nevada but is relatively unknown in vote-rich Clark County.

All of the top four candidates have run radio ads too, mostly on conservative talk show stations, as well as Internet ads.

"Once Lowden went up on TV, the others had to follow the leader," said Dave Damore, a political science professor at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, who said he doubts the power of TV advertising during a primary campaign, which relies mostly on face-to-face politicking across the state.

Damore said Lowden’s strategy is clear: to try and bury the competition early on.

And Chachas’ tactic is to get his face out there as much as possible now, closer to the election, to gain name recognition.

Now, Chachas is barely a blip on polls commissioned by the Las Vegas Review-Journal, gaining only 1 percent of voters’ support in a late February survey compared with 47 percent for Lowden, 29 percent for Tarkanian and 8 percent for Angle with 15 percent undecided.

Tarkanian, whose name is well-known because of his sports career and famous father, former UNLV coach Jerry Tarkanian, is trying hardest to tap into the Tea Party movement of voters who align themselves with conservative Republicans.

In one of Tarkanian’s radio ads, he is endorsed by the father of Sarah Palin, the former GOP vice presidential candidate in 2008, who rallied anti-Reid voters in the senator’s hometown of Searchlight over the weekend in an event that attracted 10,000 people.

Although Lowden was first up with ads, she currently is off the air but planning to launch new spots sometime during the first couple weeks of April, said campaign manager Robert Uithoven.

Uithoven expects the coming weeks will be a battle on the ground and on the air.

Already, Lowden has been coming under near-daily attack from her GOP opponents and from Reid on everything from her casino management style, to her voting record, to her statements about whether she would have supported the first government bailout of business and industry.

She has said she doesn’t support bailouts but has come under fire for telling a reporter that she sympathized with members of Congress who had to make that tough vote.

"I’m sure you will see some negative ads against Sue," Uithoven said. "When you are the front-runner, you are attacked."

Will Lowden respond in kind?

"We’ll decide at the time what we need to respond to," Uithoven said.

For now, Uithoven said the campaign is focusing on making sure her ads reveal who Lowden is and tell voters something about "her core beliefs," including being against raising taxes, bailouts and excess spending as well as demonstrating that "she has stark differences with Harry Reid."

Lowden has aired four ads, the first two focused on her biography as the daughter of an immigrant European family who came to America seeking job opportunities. She also touts her past as a former broadcast journalist, tax-fighting lawmaker and casino owner with her husband, Paul.

Her third ad took aim at the current Democratic-led government, saying "Washington is out of control” and saying she wants to get "big government" out of Americans’ lives.

"Lowden’s plan: Spend less, borrow less, tax less and no more bailouts," she said in the ad.

The fourth ad attacked Reid directly, saying the health care insurance overhaul he pushed through Congress would raise taxes, weaken Medicare, kill jobs and push the nation further into debt — all statements the Reid campaign has criticized as inaccurate as Republicans across the country have been using the same attacks.

"Government-run health care is wrong," Lowden said in the ad.

Contact Laura Myers at lmyers@reviewjournal.com or 702-387-2919.