With the New Hampshire Senate race shaping up to be unexpectedly close, due in part to national issues like the Islamic State and the Ebola outbreak, Democratic Sen. Jeanne Shaheen is looking to place the spotlight back on jobs and outsourcing.
The Shaheen campaign released a new paid web ad Wednesday, shared first with The Huffington Post, that ties Brown to two New Hampshire residents whose jobs were shipped overseas. The couple, Ed and Ginger Cunningham, discuss working for Lucent Technologies until the plant, in North Andover, Massachusetts, was closed down and jobs were outsourced.
"There were 8,000 people who worked at Lucent, and one out of four of them were New Hampshire residents," Ed Cunningham says in the video, referring to the many people in the Granite State who commute to Massachusetts for work.
The ad notes that Brown voted to give tax breaks to companies that outsourced American jobs. Ed Cunningham adds that Brown "took our tax dollars and used them to ship our jobs overseas."
"It was devastating to see it happening, watching the people leave little by little, just seeing the jobs go away, wondering what everybody was going to do," Ginger Cunningham adds.
Watch the ad above.
Brown has said he never voted to ship jobs overseas, but Shaheen has accused him of having multiple ties to outsourcing. In August, Shaheen's campaign called on Brown to resign from the board of directors of Kadant, Inc., a Massachusetts-based company that has outsourced jobs to China and Mexico.
The ad also makes a reference to Kadant but is mostly designed to portray Brown, a former senator from Massachusetts, as lacking commitment to the people of New Hampshire. Brown, who moved to New Hampshire late last year, has struggled to combat the perception that he is a carpetbagger, and remains unpopular in the Granite State.
He has nonetheless managed to narrow the gap with Shaheen to just 2 percentage points, according to HuffPost's average of all publicly available polling.
Brown has largely succeeded by tying Shaheen to President Barack Obama, whose job approval in New Hampshire is at record-low levels. Shaheen has tried to bring the focus back to New Hampshire and has used debates to mock Brown, who lost his Senate seat to Elizabeth Warren in 2012, for treating the state as a "consolation prize."
The strategy is summed up in the new web ad's final shot. "Scott Brown is NOT for New Hampshire," text across the screen reads. "Never was. Never will be."
Brown's campaign did not return a request for comment.
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