Conservative group Frontiers of Freedom Foundation this week launched a hard-hitting television advertisement characterizing Virginia Democrat gubernatorial candidate Terry McAuliffe as “the chosen candidate of the media and tech giants” who are “helping him hide from the people of Virginia.” The ad launched on Fox affiliate WTTG’s 10 PM news program and is set to run throughout this week both on WTTG and other Washington- and Northern Virginia-based channels. The spot concentrates on McAuliffe’s mostly unreported plan to override local zoning laws and construct high-density, low-income apartment units in suburban single-family neighborhoods—an endeavor that could prevent middle- and working-class families from achieving the American Dream of living in a house of their own.
Frontiers of Freedom President George Landrith stated in a press release that the group purchased a two-minute television ad in the Washington, D.C. broadcast market—which would reach residents in heavily-populated Arlington and Fairfax Counties on local news channels in order to “make Terry McAuliffe come out from cover and face the crucial questions the media is protecting him from having him to answer.”
The ad’s release comes just weeks before the long-awaited Virginia gubernatorial election between McAuliffe and Republican Glenn Youngkin on November 2, for which polls have remained razor-thin. “By making McAuliffe answer these questions, Virginians will be sending a strong message,” said Landrith. “They will be telling the radical liberals and their big business allies and the Wall Street barons that the people of Virginia won’t stand for it. And Terry McAuliffe and the liberal extremists and their billionaire allies will discover they can’t have America. They can’t have Virginia.”
As Landrith described, unlike other political ad campaigns, his group’s spot relies on providing voters with ample information rather than quick ads with little substance. “These are not 30 second attack ads that try to manipulate people,” he said, “but heavily informative narrative ads that ask Terry McAuliffe when he will reject extremist liberal views and plans.”
“The spot’s major focus is on McAuliffe’s plan to destroy single-family zoning by empowering the federal government to dictate local zoning decisions,” Landrith said. “In showing pictures of Black and Hispanic families [as] well as young people seeking a first home, the spot says such a plan would destroy the aspirations of many Americans who now have a chance to live in safe, family-friendly neighborhoods.”
“We also highlight the fact that ‘the woke’ management of Wall Street firms are buying suburban properties because they think they can make money eventually off this Washington land-grab,” Landrith continued, likely referring to recent reports that Wall Street banks and investment firms have joined in on the Democrats’ already longstanding war on suburban America.
Moreover, the ad calls attention to the circumstances under which McAuliffe received the Democratic nomination earlier this year. McAuliffe, Landrith notes, prevented younger black progressive talent like Carroll Foy and Justin Fairfax, his former primary opponents, from making names for themselves, while simultaneously allying himself with his party’s most extreme voices. “Terry McAuliffe got the Democratic nomination for governor,” he said, “by pushing aside promising young leadership in his own party and making a corrupt political bargain with the left-wing extremists to support their radical agenda.”
The ad also highlights McAuliffe’s complicity in other parts of the extremist progressive agenda, declaring that McAuliffe has allied himself with those who support causes like Critical Race Theory, defunding the police, and open borders. “Terry McAuliffe needs to be asked if he will disavow the support of his other liberal allies who support a radical agenda,” Landrith said. “Our spot shows these issues and provides back-up about them, including Critical Race Theory teaching ugly anti-American falsehoods to school children, defund[ing] the police… the illegal immigration crisis and influx of MS-13 gangs in Northern Virginia, the persecution of Catholic religious orders, and ACLU anti-religious extremism and attacks on Church tax deductions.”
Frontiers of Freedom and other like-minded groups insist the ad campaign will expose the radical leftist agenda embraced by Democrats such as McAuliffe, which has remained unacknowledged by much of the mainstream media. By underscoring McAuliffe’s support for largely unknown progressive initiatives like the eradication of single-family home zoning and attacks on religious liberty—both of which are relatively new fronts for Democrats—Frontiers of Freedom believes the ad could cause anxiety and collapse in the opposition.
McAuliffe’s largely unreported ambition to weed out America’s suburbs comes in the wake of a handful of blue state legislative measures that have effectively abolished single-family zoning (most recently in California). Like President Joe Biden and many in his party, McAuliffe’s plan relies on the nebulous and deceitful language of “systemic racism” as grounds for his sweeping anti-suburbia plans: by “spearheading zoning reform,” his campaign website underhandedly states, McAuliffe will “fight systemic racism and promote Black and Brown homeownership”—even though, as the ad states, the plan is opposed by “the majority of blacks and Hispanics—once shut out of single-family neighborhoods—who now want the right to live in one.”
In addition, the ad campaign is noticeably aimed at African American voters’ discontent with the far-left policy platform being pushed by Democrats: in addition to presenting images of African American families who could be disenfranchised by McAuliffe’s zoning plan, it features a clip of an August 2020 Wall Street Journal op-ed co-authored by former Secretary of Housing and Urban Development Ben Carson and former President Donald Trump warning of the Democrats’ anti-suburban initiatives.
“Virginians need to ask McAuliffe why he endorses the Biden-Schumer-Pelosi plan that has already been enacted in some places like California and Minnesota that would permit federal bureaucrats to dictate to local towns and cities and destroy the American dream of single-family neighborhoods,” said Landrith.
As Election Day nears and polls continue to tighten, the ad has the potential to bolster turnout for Youngkin by surfacing broadly unheard-of issues being pushed by McAuliffe and others in the Democrat camp.
Should it succeed, Landrith’s strategy could prove instrumental in helping a Republican get elected statewide in Virginia for the first time since 2009.