ABINGDON, Va. – Ask Congressman Rick Boucher how the campaign is going for his 9th District seat, and he’ll say it’s tight. Mention Republican challenger Morgan Griffith, and Boucher will note the $2.4 million worth of TV ads bought by mysterious conservative backers.
“What we’re seeing is unprecedented,” Boucher said moments before speaking at a campaign stop in Abingdon on Saturday. “It’s an avalanche of attack ads against me, funded maybe by outside sources across the nation, maybe even outside the country.”
Boucher is crisscrossing Southwest Virginia this weekend in a last-days effort to win a 15th term in Tuesday’s elections. By Saturday evening, that tour had brought him to the annual Washington County Democratic Potluck Supper and Rally at Abingdon High School.
The race has become heated in recent weeks, with pollster group SurveyUSA, hired by a Roanoke news station, placing Griffith with a one-point lead, though it is statistically a dead heat.
Griffith, the Virginia House majority leader, has closed the gap since the last week of September, when SurveyUSA had him trailing Boucher by 15 points.
Joining Boucher in Abingdon was former Virginia governor and current U.S. Sen. Mark Warner, who blasted the notion of campaign ads run by unknown adversaries.
“We need to send a message to outside money, that we don’t even know where it came from, that that’s not the type of politics we play in Southwest Virginia,” Warner told the roughly 150 people attending the Abingdon dinner.
Such Northern Virginia and Washington, D.C.-based groups as the Americans for Job Security, the National Republican Congressional Committee, and Americans for Prosperity are among the political action committees and nonprofits funding the ads, according to The Associated Press.
By comparison, these groups have funneled more money into ads attacking Boucher than Griffith’s campaign has directed toward ads promoting his own candidacy. Griffith’s camp has spent $109,000 in direct expenditures on ads.
Moments before addressing the Abingdon rally, Boucher blamed these interest groups for erasing the gap in the polls between him and Griffith.
“Some people believe the distortions and the untruths that these attack ads are saying about me,” Boucher said. “It has made the race closer.”
This is the most competitive race Boucher has faced in years, according to nonpartisan political polling Website Real Clear Politics. Boucher ran unopposed in 2008, beat his opponent with 68 percent of the vote in 2006, and won with 59 percent in 2004.
Democratic supporters point to outside spending when describing the heavy turnout at Boucher’s recent campaign rallies. One supporter is Tom Brewster, 9th District Democratic Committee chairman, who followed Boucher to Abingdon after touring with him all Saturday.
“It’s been a higher turnout than normal from the past years,” Brewster said of the crowds. “They don’t like what they’re seeing and it’s fired them up.”
Boucher also credited the outside spending for generating not only unrest, but the greatest crowd turnout that he’s seen in 20 years.
“We have never seen a negative campaign the like of this in Southwest Virginia,” he said.
mowens@bristolnews.com | (276) 645-2540
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