Mail and phone program will reach nearly 250,000 drop-off voters

WASHINGTON, D.C. – The League of Conservation Voters (LCV) today announced the launch of a $500,000 voter turnout operation to elect Rep. Bruce Braley to the U.S. Senate on November 4th. The program will focus on turning out likely Braley supporters who voted in the 2012 Presidential election but did not vote in the 2010 midterm election. It will reach nearly 250,000 voters across the state by Election Day.

“The oil billionaire Koch Brothers and Bush henchman Karl Rove will spend millions of dollars to buy Joni Ernst a Senate seat so she can promote their pollution agenda. We’re fighting back to ensure voters who value clean air and water vote for Bruce Braley,” said Daniel J. Weiss, LCV Senior Vice President for Campaigns. 

The program will reach registered Democratic and Independent voters who voted in the 2012 Presidential election but not in the 2010 midterms, who have a partisanship score 40-100 and a turnout score of 30-100.

In June, LCV kicked off a nearly $1 million coalition effort to defeat Ernst, and LCV has run three television ads in the race to educate voters about her proposals. Ernst has also been named to LCV’s trademark Dirty Dozen program this cycle. The Dirty Dozen targets candidates— regardless of party affiliation — who consistently side against the environment and are running in races in which LCV has a serious chance to affect the outcome. Last cycle, LCV defeated 11 of the 12 Dirty Dozen candidates.

Ernst pledged to shut down the Environmental Protection Agency, which is responsible for protecting public health by enforcing the Clean Air Act and Clean Water Act. She’s also talked about potentially privatizing Social Security, which would cause many Iowa workers to risk their retirement benefits on Wall Street. 

Ernst is also a climate science denier who claimed that “global temperature shifts are a result of long-term cyclical patterns rather than the result of man-made activities.” Most recently, she said she “can’t say one way or another” whether climate change is man-made. According to NASA, 97 percent of scientists agree that human activity is contributing to climate change.

Rep. Braley advocates for commonsense policies to protect our air and water. He’s earned an 89% on LCV’s 2013 National Environmental Scorecard and a lifetime score of 88%. The non-partisan Scorecard is the nationally accepted yardstick used to rate members of Congress on environmental and clean energy issues. For more information, visit https://www.lcv.org/congressional-scorecard.

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Paid for by the League of Conservation Voters, www.lcv.org, and not authorized by any candidate or candidate’s committee.