Green group hits Romney, George Allen in $1.7M homestretch ad buy

The League of Conservation Voters (LCV) hopes to tip Colorado in President Obama’s favor by highlighting Mitt Romney’s opposition to wind energy tax credits in the campaign’s final days.

The group is spending $850,000 to re-launch an ad in Denver media markets that features a worker who lost his job at Vestas Wind Systems, which has shed hundreds of jobs this year at manufacturing plants in the Centennial State.

“I got laid off because Mitt Romney and his friends in Congress want to eliminate tax credits for the wind industry,” says Chris Maese in the advertisement, slated to run through Election Day.

The Obama campaign and allied green groups are using the wind credit to try and hurt Romney in Colorado and Iowa – swing states where the wind industry is a major employer.

Romney opposes extension of a soon-to-expire tax credit that the wind industry calls vital to financing new projects and keeping the domestic supply chain humming along. Obama is pressing Congress to renew the 20-year-old incentive.

The same ad initially ran during the week of the Oct. 3 presidential debate in Denver. It shows that environmentalists are tailoring their campaign to try to undercut Romney’s argument that he’s best poised to improve the sluggish economy.

Separately, LCV and Majority PAC on Monday announced an $800,000 ad buy in three Virginia media markets against former governor and former Sen. George Allen (R), who is locked in a close race with Tim Kaine (D), also a former governor.

Majority PAC is a super-PAC trying to keep the Democrats’ Senate majority. Virginia’s race is among a handful that will decide whether control of the Senate will remain in Democrats’ hands.

“With George Allen in Washington, here’s who really wins,” states the ad from LCV and Majority PAC. “Companies getting tax breaks to ship American jobs overseas. Millionaires and oil companies already getting billions in tax breaks.”

The new buy comes on top of an earlier $1.6 million ad campaign against Allen from the two groups announced in August. The new spot is running on cable and broadcast in the Norfolk, Richmond and Charlottesville media markets, according to LCV.

LCV has spent in the $10 million range across a number of races thus far in 2012.

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