Elizabeth Dole, fighting for her political life, is out with a new TV ad highlighting that her Democratic challenger for the North Carolina Senate seat, Kay Hagan, attended a fundraiser co-hosted by a board member of the Godless Americans political action committee. Personally, I’m not a fan of the ad, because I don’t like the idea of religious tests for office, and at the end an unidentified woman’s voice can be heard declaring, “there is no God” — almost suggesting that Hagan herself is an atheist, which shouldn’t matter even if she were. 

Of course, it doesn’t matter what I think, but how the voters of North Carolina react. Beyond the God issue, it reinforces the fact that while Hagan is running for office in a conservative Southern state, she’s raising money in Boston with Massachusetts liberals. In this sense, Hagan’s defense that, “the fundraiser in question had more than 40 hosts, including Sen. John Kerry,” doesn’t seem particularly helpful. (Kerry lost NC by 12 points.)  On the other hand, the ad could backfire on Dole by coming across as a desperate negative attack, like when George Allen released salacious excerpts from Jim Webb’s novels as part of a last ditch effort to save his Senate seat.

In any event, the ad certainly gets its point across.