Left wing billionaire Tom Steyer’s attack ad on Iowa U.S. Senate candidate Joni Ernst has been ruled “FALSE” by Politifact:
It’s back! A claim out of the Democratic Party that numerous fact-checkers debunked in 2010 has made its way to the 2014 Iowa Senate race.
A new ad attacks Republican candidate Joni Ernst, painting her as beholden to special interest groups because she signed a pledge. The ad comes from NextGen Climate Action Committee, a liberal political action committee.
The ad shows a dimly lit room, with two men looking at a picture of Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, on a screen, while laughing in a slow, almost crazed manner. The screen switches to a picture of Ernst.
“We got her to pledge? Joni signed on the line,” the ad says. “The tax breaks that thing protects are gold. Green light more outsourcing! China, Mexico. All the way.”
Text on the screen says, “Ernst’s Pledge: Protects Tax Breaks for Companies that Ship Jobs Overseas.”
Even though the ad is new, this claim — that a person who signs the Americans for Tax Reform’s pledge is in favor of tax breaks that encourage outsourcing — is not.
—
We rate this claim False.
The “ship jobs overseas” claim has been repeatedly and thoroughly debunked (Associated Press: ADWATCH: With campaign ads, don’t trust, verify; FactCheck.org: A False Tax Attack) since it first surfaced in 2010.
Steyer’s NextGen Climate Action Committee spent $2.6 million on the ad.
“Billionaire Tom Steyer has been cheated by his political consultants. He should sue them and kick himself in the pants for being a naive rich dilettante taken advantage of by hustlers,” said Grover Norquist, president of Americans for Tax Reform. “His consultants claimed to write an ad attacking Iowa Republican Joni Ernst, but they simply plagiarized TV ads from four years ago that were found to be dishonest then. In school, when you turn in the same poorly researched and plagiarized paper twice, you get an F, Again. ”