A staff member for Sen. Heidi Heitkamp (D-N.D.) is no longer with the campaign following an ad that named abuse victims without their permission.
The gross mistake is all but certain to end Heitkamp’s ambitions of being reelected.
Heitkamp is already down in public polls by a significant margin to Rep. Kevin Cramer (R-N.D.). Her loss means Democrats would basically have to run the table in every other battleground race to take the chamber.
That is not going to happen.
Republicans have had Heitkamp losing by double digits in their private polling for weeks. Heitkamp admits she’s in an uphill battle after voting no on Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s nomination.
“At this point, it’s really ours to lose,” said Sen. John Thune (R-S.D.). “The race, probably to her detriment, has been nationalized around the Supreme Court and Trump.”
The Heitkamp advertisement was an open letter to Cramer, and was meant to criticize statements he made about Kavanaugh.
Heitkamp yesterday apologized for the ad, saying in a statement that some of the women identified in the ad had not given their permission to be listed, and that others were not victims of domestic violence, sexual abuse or rape.
“We recently discovered that several of the women’s names who were provided to us did not authorize their names to be shared or were not survivors of abuse,” she said. “I deeply regret this mistake and we are in the process of issuing a retraction, personally apologizing to each of the people impacted by this and taking the necessary steps to ensure this never happens again.”
Heitkamp is one of 10 Senate Democrats up for reelection this year, and rolling averages of polls show she is in the most danger, by far, of any Trump-state Democrat.
Trump easily won North Dakota in 2016.