Republican candidate for Senate in Ohio Josh Mandel launched a new ad on Tuesday highlighting Sen. Sherrod Brown's (D) late tax payments.
The ad quotes the AP and a local news report on Brown's tax delinquency. The senator paid property taxes on a Washington apartment more than four months late in 2011, and also forgot to pay them on time in 2006 and 2007.
"But Brown had no problem raising our taxes and voting six times to raise his own pay. Sherrod Brown: Making Washington work for himself," the ad says.
It closes as many of Mandel's ads do, with a clip of Mandel speaking to a group of supporters about changing Washington by sending new people to government.
The Brown campaign, in response, pointed to Mandel's campaign for and record as state Treasurer, during the first year of which he missed multiple meetings and, according to the Brown campaign, failed to pay taxes on his campaign staff.
"Josh Mandel has ignored his job as Treasurer despite promising voters he'd serve a full term, and with early voting starting today he's desperate to distract the voters from his well-deserved reputation as a politician who can't be trusted," said campaign spokeswoman Sadie Weiner.
The new ad comes the same day as a new fundraising pitch from the Mandel campaign based on internal polling that shows him lagging Brown by just 3 percentage points among all likely voters. That survey, conducted by Republican firm Public Opinion Strategies, also says that Brown's favorability is under water, with 38 percent of respondents rating him favorably and 41 percent rating him unfavorably.
That poll was conducted last week among 600 likely voters statewide and has a margin of error of plus or minus four percent, and oversampled Democrats.
But it depicts a different race from most recent independent polls, which have put Brown ahead of Mandel by a larger lead than the margin of error, including one from the Columbus Dispatch out on Monday that gave Brown a 10-percentage-point lead on Mandel. That's a stark shift from the last Dispatch poll, taken in late August, which put the two candidates in a dead heat.
--This post was published at 1:03 and updated at 3:56 p.m.
