He might be a day late, but not a dollar short.
A day after Democratic rival David Hoffman released his first television ad, Alexi Giannoulias' campaign has launched its first TV spot. While Giannoulias leads the fundraising race, the timing of his ad puts him second in the race for airtime.
It focuses on jobs, almost universally considered the leading issue in U.S. elections during this campaign season, and particularly in high-unemployment Illinois.
Specifically, the 30-second ad focuses on how Giannoulias, the state treasurer, pressed Wells Fargo, financier of a Hartmarx plant in Des Plaines, not to cut jobs at the factory.
"We sent a message to this bank," Giannoulias says in the ad. "If you want to do business in Illinois, you have to save these jobs."
I asked Kati Phillips, spokeswoman at the Giannoulias campaign, about the timing of the ad — exactly a day after Hoffman's TV campaign took off.
She declined to comment on when the campaign bought air time for the spot, but she said it was not a response to Hoffman's ad.
"It's a coincidence," Phillips told me. "I know that David had to get up early because he doesn't have a lot of name recognition."
That's not exactly how the Hoffman campaign put it. But yesterday, when I spoke with Michael Powell, campaign manager for Hoffman, he did say that his camp didn't want to delay Hoffman's appearance on TV.
"Our strategy is to begin airing advertising earlier rather than later," he told me. "It's important that people realize that David's a different kind of candidate."
Like Hoffman's spot, Giannoulias skips flamboyant tactics present in other spots during in this year's campaign season. And both candidates focused on a single issue: In Hoffman's case it was his Washington-outsider status, and in Giannoulias', it's employment.
But Giannoulias' ad, produced by Adelstein Liston, implicitly highlights the name-recognition gap between the candidates: While Hoffman introduces himself to voters in his ad, Giannoulias seems to assume people know him and jumps straight into an issue.
Hoffman's own pollsters have addressed the recognition disparity, but they paint it as evidence that Giannoulias' lead is based on that and little else.
In an October memo to the Hoffman campaign, consultant Geoffrey Garin wrote that his survey of 505 Illinois voters shows Giannoulias' lead "is relatively modest proportionate to his advantage in recognition."
Despite the fact that Giannoulias "is far better known" than either Hoffman or the Chicago Urban League's Cheryle Robinson Jackson, another Senate candidate, "the large majority of Giannoulias' current supporters acknowledge that they are behind him because they know him better than the other candidates."
Whether that is true will begin to show as both candidates spread their messages over the airwaves.