Mitch McConnell’s new ad mistakenly celebrates Duke instead of Kentucky

The Senate minority leader misses a layup

Published March 25, 2014 4:16PM (EDT)

Senate minority leader and Kentucky Sen. Mitch McConnell is in the midst of perhaps the greatest electoral challenge of his career, fending off a Tea Party primary challenger from his right and a charismatic and well-connected Democratic challenger from his left. He's fighting off charges of being corrupt, a D.C. insider, and out of touch with everyday Kentuckians.

All of this makes the fact that his latest campaign ad features a clip of Duke's men's basketball team winning the NCAA championship — instead of Kentucky, as is clearly intended to be the case — even more embarrassing.

The mistake is incredibly brief, barely on-screen for more than a second, but it was still obvious enough to cause the McConnell campaign to take down the ad, replace the image with one featuring a Kentucky player, and re-up it online.

But while Team McConnell was speedy in their damage control, they weren't quite speedy enough. Reporter Joe Sonka, who was recently barred from a McConnell event by police for extremely dubious reasons, was able to grab the original, Duke-featuring video and put it online. You can see, briefly, at the 1:09 mark that the NCAA players celebrating as confetti falls from the rafters are wearing Duke's uniform, not Kentucky's.

Overall, this is hardly the kind of thing that'll make or break McConnell's campaign. But it's still embarrassing, and it still gave his likely Democratic opponent, Alison Lundergan Grimes, cause to troll him on Twitter:

[embedtweet id="448475615629291520"]

Watch the original video below:


By Elias Isquith

Elias Isquith is a former Salon staff writer.

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