Elizabeth Dole Is Projected to Have Lost Her Senate Seat

In part, it might be “The Case of the Dueling Political Ads.”

Incumbent Elizabeth Dole R, wife of Bob Dole, has lost her Senate seat according to Fox News which has called her opponent Kay Hagen D, the winner.

“MoveOn.org had set its sights on U.S. Sen. Elizabeth Dole’s dust-up contest for re-election in North Carolina.

MoveOn spent close to half a million dollars on an ad accusing the North Carolina senator and fellow Republican John McCain of being “in the pocket of Big Oil.

So, Dole spent a pile of cash accusing her opponent Hagen of being ‘Godless.”

BUT, then… as in any culture like ours that sometimes more resembles film noir than finessed nation, along came the twist…

from USA Today:

“Democrat Kay Hagan filed a defamation suit Thursday against Sen. Elizabeth Dole’s re-election campaign, saying her opponent for a Senate seat from North Carolina inaccurately accused her of having ties to an atheist political action committee.

“A leader of the Godless Americans PAC recently held a secret fundraiser in Kay Hagan’s honor,” says the Dole ad. It ends with a female voice — not Hagan’s — saying “there is no God.”

In the suit, filed in a Wake County, N.C., court, Hagan charges that Dole, a one-term Republican, and her campaign maligned her reputation with the ad that “falsely implies that (Hagan) shares the views of an entity that calls itself the Godless Americans PAC.”

Hagan states in the suit that she attended a September fundraiser at the Boston home of Woody Kaplan but never took contributions from the Godless Americans PAC.

Ellen Johnson, executive director of Enlighten the Vote, the new name of the PAC, said Kaplan was a former advisory board member but was involved in the fundraiser independently of the PAC.