Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee targets Yoder as part of national ad campaign

The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee began airing TV ads nationwide Monday targeting vulnerable Republicans who have endorsed GOP presidential candidate Donald Trump, and among the media markets being targeted is the Kansas City-centered 3rd Congressional District of Kansas, where U.S. Rep. Kevin Yoder is running for re-election.

Neither of the two ads mentions any member of Congress by name, but DCCC officials say they are being strategically placed in markets where GOP incumbents have allied themselves with Trump.

“House Republicans, like Kevin Yoder, have allowed a man who freely attacks people and intentionally divides our nation to be their standard-bearer without lifting a finger to stop him,” DCCC Chairman Ben Ray Luján said in a statement last week.

Democrats say they have internal polling that shows Yoder is vulnerable this year. But the ad campaign is also based on a widely held belief — albeit one that Nate Silver at FiveThirtyEight.com disputes — that Trump is most unpopular among upper-income, college educated suburban voters, who make up the bulk of the Johnson County electorate.

Both ads play into that belief. One ad features a series of casually dressed voters, including a middle-age man standing by his suburban-looking home, who asks, “If he’s our standard bearer, what the heck happened to our standards?”

The other ad asks viewers how they would feel to learn that their child was a school bully or even the school bully’s sidekick. The footage alternates between cleanly dressed white male students harassing another student in school and Trump gesticulating wildly during speeches.

“Johnson County has a lot of just the kind of voter with whom Trump is polling worse than typical Republican nominees usually do: higher income, higher education, suburban, leaning conservative, and female,” said Kansas University political science professor Patrick Miller. “So Democrats probably see some rationale in hitting Yoder now, then repolling the race soon to reassess it for future investment.”

There are three Democrats vying to challenge Yoder in the general election, but the DCCC is backing Jay Sidie, a former commodities trader for Archer Daniel Midland who now runs an investment firm in Mission Woods.

The other candidates in the Aug. 2 Democratic primary are Reggie Marselus of Lenexa and Nathaniel W. McLaughlin of Kansas City.

DCCC officials said the ads that started Monday will run through the GOP national convention next week.