Campaign advertising tends to be one of two things: lifeless or ludicrous.
So the ads Sen. Tim Scott is sliding into swing states — which he revealed exclusively to The Post — should get voters’ attention.
“The left says the Republican Party is a racist party. I’m telling you something different,” Scott begins most of the ads, staring straight at the camera.
“Nothing is more racist than Democrats that chain poor black and brown kids to fail in schools, robbed of a quality education, robbed of their future,” the black South Carolinian continues. “Why? Because of power. It’s wrong.”
He closes with a line promoting each state’s GOP Senate challenger.
In Nevada, where Scott held an education-themed event with the candidate last month, he says, “We need Sam Brown in the Senate. Sam understands school choice, breaks the chains and sets kids free.”
They’re the most striking spots from any candidate or political-action committee.
Scott’s Great Opportunity PAC is spending a full $1 million to place these ads — aimed at parent and persuadable-minority voters — on connected TV in competitive Senate races, mostly in the swing states: first Nevada, Ohio and Montana, then expanding to Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin.
“So often I’ve made the statement that America is not a racist country, and I get so much pushback. And frankly, I’m not suggesting that there’s not racism somewhere in America,” Scott told The Post. “There’s nothing more racist than trapping a poor kid on the South Side of Chicago with a single mom into a place where he can’t leave. That, to me, only cements my notion that if we want to talk about racism, let’s go to big blue cities and talk about the challenges that we’re seeing.”
That’s just what party leader Donald Trump did this month.
The former president dived into Democratic stronghold Milwaukee — “home of the first and oldest school choice” program, he said — to promote educational freedom alongside students and graduates of the program.
Trump proclaimed education is “the civil-rights issue of our age.”
It’s a message Scott, who gave up his own presidential bid and endorsed the ex-prez in the primary, has been sounding for years.
“That issue resonates,” he said, “beyond racial lines. African Americans, whites, Hispanics, Asians, all agree that school choice should be their choice, not ours as politicians or elected officials, but their choice. And the ads reinforce the notion that there are parents who will vote for Republicans” — “frankly, who will vote for their kids, no matter the partisan label.”
Indeed, as Corey DeAngelis recently pointed out in these pages, “support for education freedom crosses party lines.”
School choice illustrates that core conservative concerns with choice, competition and decentralization actually fit the needs and self-interest of many voters who haven’t traditionally looked to the GOP.
“Our values as Republicans,” Scott said, “are best seen through the prism of a black grandmother or Hispanic family. They’re interested in making sure that their children, just like the rest of America, have a quality education. They want their daughters not to have to compete against boys in sports. They want to make sure that the future of this country is a meritocracy. They just want to make sure that they’re included in that merit-based system when we educate people.”
He put it bluntly: “I’ve oftentimes said the question that people want answered isn’t ‘Is the American Dream real?’” It’s “Is the American Dream real for me?”
“The difference between those two” is where Republicans offer answers — and can make inroads with needed voters.
“The truth is the decision makers in households around health care, finance and education are consistently women, whether that’s a single-parent household or two-parent household. And so if you want to focus on getting good results with women voters, talk about the issues that they talk about. And I can’t think of a more important issue to my mother than her sons,” Scott said.
And school choice is a proven winner at the ballot box, the senator argues.
“I go back to being on the campaign trail with Rick Scott a number of years ago, and one of the issues he was running on, in his final year as governor, for Senate was, in fact, the issue of educational choice. I look at Ron DeSantis, who was the beneficiary of Rick Scott’s work,” he said.
“Most experts agree,” he continued, “Ron DeSantis won his race against a black candidate because single mothers voted for their kids and not the partisan label of their choice necessarily.” The Florida governor won in 2018 with 18% of the black female vote, per exit polls.
And Iowa Gov. Kim Reynolds “was able to defeat a few state senators and state House members who stood in the way of school choice.”
Scott, raised by a single mom to become the first black senator elected from the South since Reconstruction, is optimistic education will transform lives — and the nation.
“The story will be told five years looking back on the number of changes that we’ve seen in our country because more parents have options for their kids, and they started realigning their voting records with prioritizing their kids first,” he said. “Our kids are smarter than we are. Why not give them the tools to prove it?”