After months of a blood-curdling television ad war between Dr. Mehmet Oz and David McCormick and their allies, the relatively small campaign of Kathy Barnette, a conservative commentator who has shown surprising strength in the polls, will receive a belated boost in the Republican Senate primaries in Pennsylvania.
The Club for Growth, the pro-business and anti-tax group, began booking television ads on behalf of Ms. Barnette worth $2 million, according to AdImpact, the ad tracking company.
That amount is more than 10 times what Mrs. Barnette’s campaign had spent in total on television so far, and the total number of pro-Barnette reservations could continue to grow.
Super PACs that Mr. McCormick, Dr. Oz and their campaigns have already spent or set aside $40 million in the primary.
Despite that disparity, Ms. Barnette, author of the book “Nothing to Lose, Everything to Gain: Being Black and Conservative in America,” is neck and neck with Dr. Oz and Mr. McCormick after strong debate performances garnered attention.
A Fox News poll on Tuesday showed her at 19 percent, behind Mr. McCormick at 20 percent and Dr. Oz at 22 percent – within the margin of error.
In the new ad, Ms. Barnette talks about her impoverished upbringing on “a pig farm in Alabama” and says how “this country allowed a little black girl to fight her way out of under a rock” while warning of a vanishing American dream.
The ad purchase surprised the Barnette team.
“Don’t know about it,” Bob Gillies, Mrs. Barnette’s campaign manager, said on Tuesday.
Ms. Barnette has the backing of state senator Doug Mastriano, who ran the Republican primary for governor, and has run an unabashedly hard-right campaign, attacking her better-funded rivals as “globalists” enter the debate and call into question commitment to gun rights and the anti-abortion movement.
“I’m the byproduct of a rape,” she said in a debate, challenging Dr. Oz about his previous stances on abortion. “My mother was 11 years old when I was conceived. My father was 21. I was not just a clump of cells.”
The Club for Growth has not formally approved Ms. Barnette, which makes the group’s late intervention all the more politically intriguing. The group did not respond to requests for comment.
The group feuded noisily with former President Donald J. Trump in the Ohio Senate primaries. The Club for Growth, which supported Josh Mandel, continued to attack JD Vance, the eventual winner, even after Mr. Vance won Mr. Trump’s endorsement.
The ongoing attack on Mr. Vance infuriated both Mr. Trump and his son, Donald Trump Jr., who attacked the Club for Growth during the campaign. And Mr. Vance made it clear that he was still bitter about all the attacks and called the Club by name in his victory speech, while praising his rivals for their efforts.
The Club for Growth and Mr. Trump will be an ally next Tuesday in another Senate race, in North Carolina, where both will support Representative Ted Budd against former Governor Pat McCrory.
