Elections

AFP attacks Hagan for ditching Obama’s North Carolina visit [VIDEO]

Alexis Levinson Political Reporter
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As President Barack Obama visits to North Carolina on Wednesday to deliver a speech, North Carolina Sen. Kay Hagan will not be by his side, choosing instead to stay in Washington.

Americans for Prosperity is out with a new ad attacking Hagan for supporting Obamacare and making the same claims Obama made about people not losing their health-care plans, while declining to stand on a stage with him Wednesday, accusing her of “hiding out” in Washington.

Watch the ad:

“Best friends often say and do the same things,” the narrator says over a bouncy soundtrack. “Take Barack Obama and Kay Hagan. In Washington Sen. Hagan votes with President Obama 96 percent of the time … they even talk alike,” the ad says, showing clips of the two claiming that if you like your health-care plan, under Obamacare, you can keep it, a claim that turned out not to be true.

“North Carolinians are demanding answers,” the ad says, “but Sen. Hagan is nowhere to be found.”

A spokesman told CNN that Hagan would not be in her home state Wednesday because the Senate is in session. On Wednesday, the Senate plans to vote on the short-term funding bill to fund the government through Saturday, and will likely debate the long term omnibus budget bill.

The Senate has also been negotiating a deal to pass an extension of unemployment insurance, which expired at the end of last year, leaving over a million people without unemployment insurance.

“This is just another political attack from a shadowy outside group that has no accountability to North Carolinians,” said Hagan’s campaign communications director Sadie Weiner.* “Just like she’s always been, Kay is focused on doing her job today, which includes cleaning up the unemployment insurance mess Thom Tillis created in Raleigh, voting on a bill to avoid a government shutdown, and attending an Armed Services Committee briefing on Iraq and Syria.”

“It seems like the fringe, special interest disdain for middle class families runs so deep that they don’t understand the simple importance of Kay doing the job she was elected to do in the Senate,” Weiner added. “On the other hand, Thom Tillis is so wrapped up in his special interest agenda that he repeatedly skipped out on his job to raise campaign cash.”

Hagan is up for re-election this year, and she faces a tough election with a Republican leaning electorate that is not at all fond of the president. Back in 2011, when she was not up for re-election, she was there to meet the campaigning president on the tarmac when he arrived in her home state.

*This post has been updated with a response from the Hagan campaign.

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