Jaime Herrera Beutler Turns to Misleading Negative Ad in Desperate Attempt to Distract from Her Indefensible Record

Herrera Beutler’s untruthful TV ad tries to mislead voters on Carolyn Long’s positions on prescription drugs, tax reform, and health care

For Immediate Release | October 13, 2020

SEATTLE — After her disastrous debate performance on Friday against her surging Democratic challenger Carolyn Long, Jaime Herrera Beutler is showing her true colors as a career politician by trying to mislead voters in Southwest Washington about Carolyn Long’s positions on the issues. This should not surprise anyone in WA-03, as Herrera Beutler employed the same tactics when facing her first serious reelection challenge from Long in 2018.

Why? Because she knows that if working people in Southwest Washington knew what she actually stood for, they’d send her packing on Election Day. Here’s what Herrera Beutler is trying to distract from with her latest misleading ad:

    • Herrera Beutler has repeatedly voted to strip health care from hundreds of thousands of Washingtonians — and is proud of it: Herrera Beutler has taken $90,000 from the health insurance industry while bragging that she voted “more than 80 times” to dismantle our health care system by repealing the Affordable Care Act without a plan to replace it. If the ACA were repealed, 654,000 Washingtonians would lose coverage, 3.1 million Washingtonians would lose protections for their pre-existing conditions, and our state would lose $4 billion in federal funding.
    • Herrera Beutler’s claims about being bipartisan aren’t supported by her record: Flip-flopping on her attempt in 2016 to distance herself from the least popular president in a century, Herrera Beutler is now fully supporting Trump. And it’s not just her personal vote in this year’s election where she’s backing a president whose failed leadership on the pandemic has cost more than 210,000 American lives — Herrera Beutler has voted with her party’s leaders 90% of the time and with Trump 82% of the time in Congress and opposed his impeachment.

 

  • Herrera Beutler said  her “defining moment” in Congress was voting for Trump’s 2017 tax cuts for the 1% and big corporations. Future generations of Southwest Washingtonians will pay for her dishonesty: Despite falsely claiming to the Columbian editorial board that the federal deficit was declining prior to the pandemic, the tax cuts Herrera Beutler was so proud of voting for in 2017 have now blown a trillion dollar hole in our federal budget; with a projected trillion more to come. Even prior to the pandemic, the Trump administration was threatening cuts to Medicare and Social Security to pay for their tax cuts to the same big corporations that have helped Herrera Beutler remain in Congress for the last decade.

 

What’s truly a new low for the embattled Republican Congresswoman is her direct smear against her opponent’s spouse: in her misleading TV ad, Herrera Beutler attempts to blame Carolyn’s husband for his employer’s decision to increase the cost of insulin. In reality, Carolyn’s husband formerly worked for a period as a salesperson, and had no executive or decision-making role. He is no longer even employed in the pharmaceutical industry. It is important that voters in Southwest Washington know the truth, and that her personal attacks on a candidate’s family is to distract from her own record, especially since Herrera Beutler will most certainly continue these shameless attacks in the future.  

“This pathetically predictable tactic of trying to mislead voters shows how desperate Jaime Herrera Beutler is to keep people in Southwest Washington from examining her record of failing to deliver for her constituents,” said Tina Podlodowski, chair of the Washington State Democratic Party. “She should be ashamed of this unconscionable smear against Carolyn’s husband, but her record of consistently supporting Trump’s divisive, personal attacks and his toxic agenda tells us there’s nothing she won’t do to keep her job.”

 

###