As campaigns and candidates make their closing arguments to voters, political super PACs affiliated with Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) have spent or plan to spend more than $400 million against Republican senate candidates. The dominant issue in these ads is abortion. The dominant feature in these ads is falsehood.
Take a recent advertisement attacking former Maryland Governor Larry Hogan’s (R) record on abortion. A female doctor in a white coat begins, “Years ago, I had a miscarriage. Doctors gave me a lifesaving abortion …” The ad breezily conflates natural miscarriage and elective abortion, which are two very different situations.
“As a woman who has had two miscarriages, I can say that neither one was what is culturally referred to as ‘an abortion,’” said Mary Szoch, director of Family Research Council’s Center for Human Dignity, to The Washington Stand. “During my first miscarriage, the physician viewing my ultrasound said, ‘Your uterus is empty. Clearly, you aborted.’ I was furious and heartbroken, even though I fortunately knew that the medical terminology for a miscarriage is spontaneous abortion.”
“The attempts by the pro-abortion industry to conflate miscarriage and what is culturally known as abortion harm women and, in some places, have convinced women that laws protecting unborn children prevent their mothers from getting the lifesaving care they need,” insisted Szoch. “This is simply a lie, and the pro-abortion industry must stop pushing this lie.”
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This political attack ad and others like it are produced and paid for by WinSenate, a super PAC affiliated with Senate Majority PAC, another super PAC closely tied to Schumer. WinSenate had spent $183 million in the 2024 election cycle as of Tuesday, of which $3 million was spent for Democrats, and just shy of $180 million was spent against Republicans.
Despite its well-filled coffers, WinSenate has virtually no online presence. Its website consists of a single page with no information — evidently the bare minimum to retain the domain name. A separate website sponsored by WinSenate, which targets Hogan, provides seven sentences of text and links to three articles. Even a Google search for its video attack ads turned up nothing.
Who are its staff? Where are its headquarters? How does it get its funding? These are questions I cannot answer.
It’s right there in the name. Rather than garnering publicity, WinSenate is dedicated to winning the Senate. It appears laser-focused on spending every dollar it receives on buying attack ads against Republican candidates. Its low profile even helps by protecting it from exposure to scrutiny.
But, for Maryland residents, such attack ads are “bombarding” their television screens, in the words of The Baltimore Banner. Living in an overwhelmingly liberal D.C. suburb, my wife and I can encounter three or four attack ads during a single episode of “Blue Bloods.”
But the ads disparaging Hogan’s abortion record are, at best, misleading. Even when the ads aren’t conflating miscarriage with abortion, each one drives home the point that “Larry Hogan is opposed to abortion.” As proof, the ads offer a two-second clip of Hogan saying he is “personally opposed to abortion” — the same line Joe Biden uses — and one time he vetoed a funding bill that included expanded funding for abortion (the ads don’t state the reason for his veto).
I only wish Hogan were as pro-life as the ads make him appear. (Clearly, I’m not the target audience.) Hogan’s campaign website has a whole section touting his pro-abortion record as governor of Maryland, and it prominently displays a promise he made to support legislation that would codify Roe. Hogan may be marginally more pro-life than his Democratic opponent (perhaps on the Hyde Amendment, for example), but he is far from a reliable pro-life vote.
Hogan isn’t the only focus of WinSenate’s attack ads, nor even the primary focus. According to Open Secrets, in the 2024 election cycle, WinSenate has spent approximately:
- $49 million against Bernie Moreno (R) in Ohio;
- $39 million against Dave McCormick (R) in Pennsylvania;
- $28 million against Sam Brown (R) in Nevada;
- $18 million against Eric Hovde (R) in Wisconsin;
- $16 million against Kari Lake (R) in Arizona;
- $15 million against Tim Sheehy (R) in Montana;
- $11 million against Mike Rogers (R) in Michigan;
- $4.7 million against Hogan in Maryland;
- and a combined $2.9 million boosting six of their Democratic opponents.
This represents substantial investment in nearly every remotely competitive senatorial contest.
WinSenate’s attack ads in these other contests are similarly misleading. Last week, Politifact, a left-wing organ of narrative control, gave a “Mostly False” rating to WinSenate’s claim that “Dave McCormick is fully against abortion.” In his 2024 campaign, McCormick expressed support for rape, incest, and life of the mother exceptions and expressed opposition to national pro-life protections. (There may be a lesson here for Republican candidates seeking national office: the Left will paint them as anti-abortion even if it’s a lie, so they may as well take a rhetorical stand for the unborn and articulate a coherent defense of pro-life principles.)
The attack ads (and accompanying falsehoods) are not confined to the abortion issue. In Wisconsin, Republican nominee Eric Hovde has sued WinSenate for defamation over their claims about his personal finances.
While WinSenate’s negative ads are already in full swing, other left-leaning super PACs have yet to open fire. The Washington Post reports that Schumer’s Senate Majority PAC, which is associated with WinSenate, has reserved $239 million worth of television advertising in seven states, which voters will see between now and Election Day.
One reason why the Left is investing in Senate races so intensely is that they face a very good chance of losing control of the chamber. This cycle, the vast majority of Senate seats up for reelection are currently controlled by Democrats, while Republicans only have to defend a smaller number of relatively safe seats. After Senator Joe Manchin’s (I) retirement from the Senate, Republicans are nearly assured one pick-up opportunity in West Virginia, which would create a 50-50 Senate, in which control will be determined by the result of the presidential contest. But, to reach that result, which is currently their best-case scenario, Democrats will have to win senate races in all eight states mentioned above — all of which are currently held by Democrats.
With control of the Senate on the line, the Left has pulled out all the stops, including nearly half a billion dollars in the outside funding they claim to despise. This money is being cynically spent in dishonest attack ads that — of all things — celebrate the moral abomination that is abortion.
LifeNews Note: Joshua Arnold is a staff writer at The Washington Stand, contributing both news and commentary from a biblical worldview. Originally published by The Washington Stand.
