Liberal environmentalists, including billionaire Tom Steyer, are pumping cash into the Wolverine State to back up struggling Democratic U.S. Senate candidate Rep. Gary Peters (D-MI), opponent Terri Lynn Land (R) says.
Joe Kildea, Land’s campaign adviser, told Breitbart News:
With Peters slipping in the polls and facing charges of hypocrisy due to a major investment in petcoke, radical organizations and individuals like Tom Steyer are pouring millions into Michigan’s U.S. Senate race with false attack ads because they support Gary Peters’ job-killing agenda which includes opposing the Keystone XL Pipeline and supporting cap-and-trade which could kill 100,000 Michigan jobs.
On Wednesday, the leftwing group, the League of Conservation Voters (LCV), announced an ad buy criticizing Land over climate change.
“We see it every day in Michigan–climate change having real effects,” a female narrator reads in the new LCV attack ad. “So why is Terri Lynn Land still ignoring the science? She’s got her reasons, over six million of them from the Koch Brothers front groups backing her campaign so polluters can keep dumping carbon pollution into our air with no limits.” The ad then asks, “Can we really trust Terri Lynn Land to do what’s right for Michigan?”
LCV’s Senior Vice President of Campaigns Daniel Weiss claimed in a comment to The Hill that Land received $6 million from the Koch brothers. “The flood of Koch Brothers related money to support Land is more important to her than thousands of scientists warning about the damages from extreme weather and other climate impacts,” Weiss said.
But the LCV ad, and a new multi-million-dollar pledge of support for Peters from liberal billionaire environmentalist hedge fund manager Steyer–whom a recent report from the Media Research Center’s Business and Media Institute said is a “clone” of iconic liberal billionaire George Soros–seems to be coming in response to Land’s gaining support in the state, hanging tough in recent polls that put her in striking distance a couple months from election day.
Land has made immigration–specifically stopping amnesty and supporting getting Americans and struggling Michiganders jobs instead of giving jobs to illegal aliens–a major part of her campaign, and it’s working. A recent George Washington University Battleground Poll, the Washington Examiner‘s Rebecca Berg reports, shows that Americans trust Republicans more than Democrats on immigration; it found that 48 percent of Americans trust Republicans on the issue, whereas just 41 percent trust Democrats. Berg reports that the poll shows that in states with competitive Senate races, like Michigan, the trust of Republicans over Democrats on immigration jumps up to 61 percent.
At the same time, Peters has been hit hard over contradictory stances he’s taken on petcoke, or petroleum coke, used in oil refinery. Peters has $20,000 worth of stock in a company that’s cashing in on petcoke, but has been taking political stances against the issue–something that helped him attract support from what Kildea from Land’s campaign calls “radical” leftists like Steyer.
A new ad from the Land campaign fires at Peters over the petcoke hypocrisy, with a narrator asking voters, “Whose side is Gary Peters on?”
“Peters says ‘yes’ to petcoke and has a $20,000 investment in a company that produces petcoke,” the narrator says on a split screen with two images of Peters with different backgrounds behind both, adding:
Peters says “no” to petcoke, and his campaign is receiving $2.5 million in help from billionaire environmentalist Tom Steyer. Steyer wants to block American energy projects like Keystone XL pipeline and is spending millions to attack Terri Lynn Land on, you guessed it: petcoke. Peters wants to make money with a petcoke producer and take money from a petcoke opponent. And now he claims it’s no big deal.
The ad then cuts to a video of Peters defending his ownership of petcoke profit stock while politically opposing it. “Even though I own a little bit of stock in a company, that doesn’t stop me from speaking out,” Peters says in the clip, as cut by the ad.
Despite all of this negativity back and forth in Michigan, Land is basing her campaign on conservative populism–focusing on reaching out to voters, rather than political and business elites like those Peters has aligned himself with, to push for their economic concerns. Land’s campaign slogan, “Michigan First,” cuts across each of her plans, including immigration, trade policy, and transportation issues–each of which she’s designed to focus on helping economically struggling Michiganders, a meta narrative that looms large nationally given the bankruptcy of Detroit.
“Terri Lynn Land is talking to voters about how she will put Michigan First by creating jobs, balancing the budget, paying down the debt, securing our border, and repealing and replacing Obamacare,” Kildea said.
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