Afl-Cio ‘Voter Guides’ Break New Ground Televised Ads Aren’t Covered By Campaign-Finance Laws

The AFL-CIO’s campaign against the Republican Congress is breaking new ground with television ads it calls “voter guides.”

After months of running so-called “issue ads” which criticize the votes taken by a member of Congress on such issues as Medicare, the labor federation is offering pointed comparisons between Republican and Democratic candidates.

The video voter guides began airing last month against Rep. Helen Chenoweth of Idaho and run in 27 other congressional districts. They represent an untested technique in the political advertising wars. While groups from the Christian Coalition to the Sierra Club have long distributed printed voter guides, the union group said this was the first use of televised voter guides.

The “working family” voter guides, which cover such issues as Medicare, taxes, education and pensions, are part of a $20 million advertising campaign launched by the AFL-CIO this year.

Although the organization asserts the advertising effort is a non-partisan attempt to educate voters about candidates’ stands on issues, the ads have been running in districts of Republican lawmakers the AFL-CIO is trying to defeat.

A 30-second spot running in Spokane asks: “Where do the candidates stand? Congresswoman Helen Chenoweth voted to cut Medicare funding by $270 billion.” Democratic challenger Dan Williams, the ad says, “opposes those Medicare cuts. When it comes to Medicare, there is a difference.” Viewers are then asked to call a union information number through which they can get printed voter guides that address various issues.

Federal Election Commission regulations allow labor unions, corporations and other groups to produce and distribute voter guides as long as the guides are accurate and balanced.

The rules do not specify the format - booklet or television ad. Unlike ads that directly advocate the election or defeat of a candidate, the voter guides are not subject to normal campaign-finance rules: They can be paid for directly out of union or corporate funds, and the amounts spent do not have to be reported to the FEC.

“These ads are really testing the frontier in terms of what you can say about candidates without it being considered a campaign ad,” said Brown University political scientist Darrell West, a specialist on campaign commercials. “The problem with the guidelines is that these are really campaign ads but they’re not being subjected to any of the campaign-finance regulations.”

The new ads, West said, represent “a further erosion of the current campaign-finance rules to the point where they’re on the verge of being obsolete.”

AFL-CIO public-affairs chief Denise Mitchell, who is running the advertising campaign, said the ads “mention both candidates and lay out the positions of both candidates. We don’t think they in any way endorse a Democratic candidate.”

House Republicans have written to TV and radio stations urging them not to run the spots on the grounds they violate the law against direct corporate or union help for candidates. In Spokane, none has been pulled.

“Unlike advertisements purporting to advocate support of or opposition to legislative issues, these October ads are partisan campaign commercials endorsing Democratic candidates by name,” the National Republican Congressional Committee wrote to station managers. “The exclusive purpose of these partisan ads is to unlawfully influence the elections in November.”

The NRCC has been striking back with an advertising campaign of its own attacking “the big labor bosses in Washington … spending big money, spreading big lies, to buy their control of Congress.” But in Spokane, the ads are sponsored by the Washington state GOP, which assumed incorrectly the unions would include Rep. George Nethercutt in this round of attack. The Republican freshman from Spokane was hit with “issue ads” in the summer, but not subjected to the “voter guides” yet.

So while the unions compare the stands of Chenoweth and Williams, the response is directed against Washington Democrat Judy Olson, who thus far has not been named in any AFL-CIO ad.

, DataTimes