A 'cash crunch' forces Senate Republicans to abandon traditional ads
High ad rates and a Democratic cash advantage have the GOP scrambling
The National Republican Senatorial Committee has canceled all of its planned independent expenditures across the country
and will instead use the money to finance "#hybrid" #ads with its candidates, reports Politico's Ally Mutnick.
The move, she explains is due to a "cash crunch" Republicans are facing thanks to superior fundraising by Democratic candidates.
Thanks to that deficit, the NRSC's shift has been underway for months.
Only the Senate races in Michigan and Nevada are still seeing traditional "#independent #expenditures"
from the committee, and these, too, will soon come to an end.
Hybrid commercials, allow outside spenders to split the cost of advertising with the campaign they're boosting
-- and take advantage of federal rules requiring stations to charge lower rates to candidates rather than the higher rates third-party groups face.
Party committees and super PACs can therefore get more bang for their buck,
especially in media markets where an influx of political ads has caused the cost of ad time to skyrocket.
Unnamed Republicans tell Mutnick that one such market is #Missoula, Montana, where 
outside groups now need to pay an astonishing 25 times as much as a candidate would.
Those same sources also relay that,
had the NRSC continued to air ads against Democratic Sen. Jacky Rosen in Nevada,
it would need to pay a rate 10 times greater than the one its nominee, Sam Brown, is getting.
There's a drawback, though. Hybrid ads are subject to more stringent content requirements than other commercials.
Most notably, such ads are required to reference a political party writ large,
as opposed to just a single candidate.
These requirements, Mutnick notes, can make these spots "clunky and difficult to design."
That may not be much of a concern in 
red states like Montana or Ohio where a message broadly attacking Kamala Harris and the Democratic Party will likely be popular.
However, it can be more of an impediment in swing seats where the GOP candidates need to win over at least some voters open to backing Harris.
It's an especially serious obstacle in dark blue Maryland where Republican Larry Hogan is doing whatever he can to distance himself from Donald Trump and his allies.
However, the NRSC may not feel a need to invest in Maryland because a super PAC funded in part by
conservative #megadonor #Ken #Griffin is spending huge amounts on independent expenditures, and those ads are under no obligation to mention the rest of the GOP
https://www.the-downballot.com/p/morning-digest-a-crash-crunch-forces
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