Senate GOP launches first attack in Michigan Senate race

The campaign arm of Senate Republicans is launching its first attack on the Michigan Senate race, targeting Democratic Rep. Elissa Slotkin on pandemic relief spending, according to an ad first shared with NBC News.

Slotkin easily won his party’s primary on Tuesday, setting up a race against former Republican Rep. Mike Rogers in November. And Republicans are wasting no time attacking Slotkin, who is in his third term, in a race that will be key to control of the Senate.

National Republican Senatorial Committee independent spending announcement, first of election cycle, begins a purchase of US$ 10 million in the Michigan race.

O NRSC Announcementwhich will be broadcast on TV, radio and digital platforms, targets Slotkin’s support for government spending during the coronavirus pandemic, criticizing her support for a measure that provided stimulus checks to millions of people as well as prisoners.

The announcement notes that stimulus check recipients included former USA Gymnastics doctor Larry Nassar, who was convicted of committing sexual assaults against hundreds of girls and women on the national team and in Michigan, and convicted the Marathon bomber from Boston, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev.

“Elissa Slotkin voted in favor of unnecessary spending that caused inflation to soar and made life unaffordable for Michigan families,” NRSC spokeswoman Maggie Abboud said in a statement. “Larry Nassar and the Boston Marathon bomber benefited from Slotkin’s policies – the Michiganders were defeated.”

Federal judges ordered Tsarnaev and Nassar deliver their stimulus payments, as well as other funds in their accounts, to victims.

Slotkin said when he supported the pandemic relief measure in early 2021 that the pandemic was “the number one threat to the health and economic security of Michiganders right now.”

“That being said, there are certainly aspects of this bill that I don’t like,” Slotkin said in a statement at the time. “As with pre-COVID relief packages we considered, it is far from perfect. I would have preferred a more targeted distribution of stimulus checks and that we had kept this package tightly tailored to COVID relief.”

Slotkin faced attacks for his support of government spending in his 2022 House re-election, which was one of the most expensive races in the country. She defeated then-State Senator Tom Barrett by 5 percentage points.