Republican crime ads are back. The victims' families didn't sign up for this.

Labor Day is officially behind us, which means two things: the final sprint to Election Day has finally begun, and it's the time of year when Republicans start talking nonstop about crime and immigration again. But, this cycle, a few of the GOP’s candidates in must-win races are bungling their attempt to exploit tragedy for partisan gain. 

Last week, independent journalist Judd Legum published the backstory behind a television ad by Republicans’ Senate Super PAC flooding the airwaves in North Carolina. Since early August, the Senate Leadership Fund has run a spot featuring Ronald Hayes, a man whose 23-year-old son was murdered in Charlotte in 2024. In the ad, Hayes appears to blame Democratic Senate candidate and former Gov. Roy Cooper for his son’s death, by way of releasing criminals from prison during his tenure. 

The problem, as Legum reported, is that Hayes says he had no idea he was making a political ad. According to his account, a Republican consultant approached a support group of crime victims’ family members with an offer to share their stories on camera. The consultant referred to himself as "independent," never disclosed his ties to the SLF, and invited Hayes to a home in Charlotte to record what Hayes believed was a spot about gun violence and his self-published book about his son. Midway through the process, the questions turned to Cooper and pandemic-era prisoner releases, a topic Hayes says he knew nothing about. When he answered without naming the former governor, the crew egged him on and asked him to say "Roy Cooper" on camera. Hayes, who is a Democrat and had voted for Cooper before, told NC Newsline that he felt "swindled" and called the ad deceiving. The NRSC has since put millions of dollars behind the deceptive advertising. 

That Hayes ad is unfortunately just one piece of a broader Republican effort to attach Cooper's name to killings he had little to do with. 

Another spot from the Senate Leadership Fund features Stephen Federico, whose 22-year-old daughter was shot during a home invasion in 2025, and who says in the ad that his child was "a casualty of an agenda" before pivoting to Cooper's prisoner releases.

Except, as FactCheck.org's Robert Farley laid out, Federico’s daughter was killed in Columbia, South Carolina, by a South Carolina man with a lengthy South Carolina record who was released by South Carolina authorities. The News & Observer's Danielle Battaglia checked the public records and found the suspect has no inmate or criminal history in North Carolina at all. Carolina Forward put it bluntly on X: “The whole crime literally has no connection to North Carolina whatsoever, except that the victim happens to have been born in Waxhaw.”

What’s kind of crazy is that SLF doesn’t really dispute any of this. A spokesman for the group conceded to the News and Observer that a viewer could easily come away thinking the murder happened in North Carolina: “Obviously, if you watch it, you can definitely read into it as if it occurred in North Carolina.”

And a third example of Republicans bungling the crime attack in North Carolina is the case of Iryna Zarutska’s murder, which has long been a major cause in Republican circles. Back in February, Cooper’s GOP opponent, Michael Whatley, released a digital ad that included surveillance footage of the Ukrainian refugee’s murder on Charlotte's light rail, months after her family's attorney publicly begged people to stop circulating it. Whatley defended his campaign’s decision to violate the family’s wishes at the time, arguing the public needed to see it before the election. 

The North Carolina examples are bad enough, but the whole thing seems to be becoming a bit of a trend considering this has also happened in Ohio’s Senate race. 

Up in the Buckeye State, the NRSC recently ran an ad in support of Sen. Jon Husted, who is facing a tough reelection fight against Democratic former Sen. Sherrod Brown. The ad, titled “Dangerous for Ohio,” opens by claiming Brown "opened our borders to dangerous illegals," then cuts to an image of Lynnea and Luke Soposki and their one-year-old son, who were killed earlier this year when a semi-truck plowed into stopped traffic.

Two weeks ago, the New York Times reported that the Soposkis' relatives were never consulted by the NRSC before the ad aired. Lynnea's brother told the Times that he repeatedly wrote to the Husted campaign privately, and after a week of silence decided the family had to go public. "We certainly would not have said yes, but quite frankly, I think they knew that," he said. By then the ad had over $1 million behind it, and had racked up millions of views on YouTube. 

In response, Husted told reporters that his campaign had "nothing to do with it," even though the ad's own disclaimer says it was “authorized by Husted for Senate.” The NRSC, for its part, has not backed down. Spokesman Nick Puglia told the Daily Beast that Brown backed open-border policies for 32 years and promised the ad campaigns would continue. 

Look, I know nobody in Republican politics is going to apologize for running crime ads, and it’s a messaging lane that has been deployed by the party to attack Democrats for decades. Strategists believe these types of ads are effective, and with both North Carolina and Ohio serving as critical battlegrounds in the fight to take the Senate, the outside groups have every incentive to escalate the attacks until Election Day. 

But, there's a pretty big difference between a narrator reading crime statistics over stock footage and a super PAC operative sitting in a rented mansion, coaching a father to say a candidate's name so it can be spliced into a spot he never agreed to make. In each of these cases, the victims’ families are begging Republicans to stop using their tragedies for political gain, but so far, the party's answer has been to keep those ad dollars flowing.

According to a new Gallup poll released last week and reported by POLITICO, “nearly 90 percent of Americans believe corruption is rampant in government.”

As OpenAI keeps expanding its influence over our society, politics, and government, the massive tech company announced a new slate of in-house lobbyists in a brief item picked up by Axios. One of those hires is Jessica Schumer, daughter of Democratic Senate leader Chuck Schumer. She’ll reportedly work on state-level policy.

Here’s why it matters: Voters across the political spectrum already assume that members of Congress are corrupt and answer to special interests (see chart above, lol) and plenty of them see AI executives as out-of-touch billionaires stripping control out of regular people's daily lives. So having the Democratic leader's own daughter go to work lobbying on OpenAI's behalf — even on the state level — is… not exactly a great look.