RALEIGH — Cheri Beasley, the presumed Democratic nominee for the state’s open 2022 U.S. Senate seat, launched her first TV ad of her campaign on Wednesday.
The ad shows Beasley driving on a rural road touting her first job after graduating law school working as a public defender.
“As a public defender, I represented North Carolinians who couldn’t afford a lawyer because everyone has a right to representation,” Beasley says in a voiceover on the ad.
Beasley goes to say she’ll be a voice for North Carolina because “Washington isn’t listening.”
That appears to be a way for Beasley to earn separation from her own party, who control both houses of Congress and the White House.
North State Journal reached out to Beasley’s campaign asking if the line was an attack on national Democrats. The campaign has not responded at this time.
The ad fails to mention inflation, the economy, or the border crisis, issues that consistently are rated as most important in both state and national polling.
A High Point University poll released earlier this month gave Democratic President Joe Biden poor ratings inflation, the economy, and immigration.
The poll showed 65% of North Carolinians surveyed disapproved of Biden’s handling of the economy in general and 61% disapproved of his handling of inflation.
A Morning Consult survey rated Biden’s decision to end Title 42 at the southern border his “most unpopular move yet,” noting that 56% of voters opposed the measure including many Senate Democrats.
A spokeswoman for the Republican National Committee, Savannah Viar, said of the ad, “Cheri Beasley is Chuck Schumer and Joe Biden’s hand-picked candidate; it’s laughable that her proposal to fix the Democrats’ mounting crises is to send yet another Democrat to Washington. Thankfully, North Carolinians see through her lies and will elect a Republican to return to the Senate this November.”
Beasley appears to be in good shape to formally clinch the Democratic nomination in the May 17 primary. Both of her most serious challengers in 2021, Erica Smith and Jeff Jackson, ended their campaigns and later opted to run for the U.S. House of Representatives instead.
