BLOOM DAIRY, INC. issued the following announcement on July 14.
The 60-second ad does not mention President Donald Trump or even urge Texans to cast a ballot for the former vice president this fall. Instead, it sounds more like a public service announcement by someone who is already president.
"I'm thinking of all of you today across Texas," Biden says in the ad, which opens with a view of the small, desert town of Marfa in West Texas and features Texans in cowboy hats and masks. "The virus is tough, but Texas is tougher," the presumptive Democratic nominee says in the Lone Star State ad – different versions of which are set to run in Florida, Arizona and North Carolina.
I know the rise in case numbers is causing fear and apprehension," Biden says, referring to the spike in cases that recently led the state's GOP governor, Greg Abbott, to mandate face masks in public in most counties after he resisted such calls. "We can stop the spread. … We have to step up and do both the simple things and the hard things to keep our families and our neighbors safe."
Biden closes with a promise and an implicit criticism of Trump, who has downplayed the spread of the virus and badgered schools to reopen this fall, threatening the loss of federal funding if they stay closed.
"If you're sick, if you're struggling, if you're worried about how you're going to get through the day, I will not abandon you," Biden says in the spot. "We're all in this together. We'll fight this together, and together, we'll emerge stronger than we are."
[ READ: Democracy Demographics: The data behind the votes ]
The ad buy is a sign of the increasingly tenuous grip Republicans have on Texas, which has voted for the Republican nominee for president every election since 1972, except for 1976, when fellow Southerner Jimmy Carter won in a post-Watergate campaign. While Texas is still dominated at the state level by GOP elected officials, it is now a legitimate battleground state in the presidential campaign.
Polling this spring and summer has shown Biden going from being neck and neck with Trump in Texas to leading by 5 percentage points in a Dallas Morning News/UT Tyler survey release Sunday.
Trump took the state in 2016 by a relatively small margin of 9 percentage points – less than his win in Iowa. But that early warning sign for Republicans was largely ignored, since Trump scored upset victories in the formerly blue terrain of Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin.
Original source here.
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