Young Kim, California’s Republican candidate for the 39th Congressional District, has dropped her first ad, targeting first-term Democratic incumbent Gil Cisneros’s corporate PAC pledge and his D.C. voting record.
The voiceover in the ad says: “Two years ago, Gil Cisneros promised he’d oppose Nancy Pelosi for speaker, then elected Pelosi speaker with his very first vote. Cisneros promised us he’d be independent, then voted with his party 100% of the time, mega-millionaire Gil Cisneros even promised he’d reject PAC donations, then took a million dollars from PACs. Gil Cisneros deceived us just to get elected, because Gil Cisneros puts his interests over ours.”
“Gil Cisneros has shown time and again that we cannot trust him to stand by his word. Now, as he desperately tries to hang onto power, Gil is attempting to rewrite history and deceive voters again. From his PAC donations to his support of Nancy Pelosi, Gil’s promises ring hollow, and the voters of the 39th District deserve better,” Kim said in a statement.
The Cisneros campaign is adamant the congressman has stuck to his original campaign pledge that he would not take money specifically from corporate PACs, arguing that labor PACs are different from Corporate PACs.
“Corporate PACs have certain structural advantages over labor PACs per se, in that corporate PACs are allowed as a corporation to pass off mostly administrative fees as business expenses, so they do not come out of their PACs,” Cisneros campaign manager Joe Farrell told the Washington Examiner.
The Kim campaign responded that Cisneros only started to make these exceptions about PACs when he was first questioned about them, and the $1 million is a combined sum he received that comes from PAC donations and candidate committee contributions that are rooted in corporate contributions.
Cisneros, who was elected in 2018 during the Democrat “blue wave” midterm election cycle, is currently in a tight race with Kim, a former California assemblywoman, according to an internal poll conducted for Kim’s campaign earlier in the month by Public Opinion Strategies.
The race will be a rematch between Cisneros and Kim, who faced off two years ago after Republican Rep. Ed Royce retired from the 39th Congressional District seat. Cisneros bested Kim with 51.6% of the vote to her 48.4% in the district, taking in northern Orange County and bits of southeast Los Angeles County.
