A pro-veteran political action committee has announced plans to spend $300,000 on television ads to take Arkansas Republican Senate candidate Tom Cotton to task "for turning his back on his fellow veterans,"
VoteVets Action Fund disclosed in a press release.
The ads against Cotton, who is challenging incumbent Sen. Mark Pryor, is part of a three-state television ad purchase, totaling nearly $800,000. The PAC will also run ads next week in Michigan and Hawaii as well.
“You might have heard Tom Cotton voted against seniors and farmers in Washington, D.C. But it’s also important that you know he voted against veterans,” Vietnam veteran John Simmons, says in the ad.
Story continues below video.
Simmons says he respects Cotton's military service, but does not "trust him enough" to send him to the Senate. The ad is centered on Cotton's vote in support of the chained consumer price index (CPI), a reconfigured Social Security formula that the veterans PAC contends will reduce future benefits.
Pryor is trailing Cotton in three out of four of the most recent polls taken,
according to RealClearPolitics.
The incumbent Democrat was on the receiving end of criticism from veterans and military groups in March after he said Cotton had a "sense of entitlement" because of his military service.
"There's a lot of people in the Senate that didn't serve in the military. Obviously in the Senate we have all types of different people, all kinds of different folks that have come from all types of different backgrounds — and I think that's part of that sense of entitlement that he gives off is that, almost like, I served my country, let me into the Senate. But that's not how it works in Arkansas,"
Pryor told NBC News on March 5.
Cotton, who served in Iraq and Afghanistan, responded with humor in an ad featuring his old Army drill sergeant.
Watch the video here.
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