This past July, a GOP-aligned outside group called OneNation announced that it would be spending $15 million on digital and broadcast ads attacking Georgia Democratic Senator Jon Ossoff.
These ads supplemented the over $40 million spent by the Senate Leadership Fund, the GOP Super Political Action Committee (PAC) boosting Georgia GOP Rep. Mike Collins, who faces off with Ossoff in November’s Senate race.
If you live in a competitive region in Georgia, as I do, you probably can’t go a day without seeing one of OneNation’s ads attacking Ossoff.
One of them features a woman identified as “Lisa Gay” from Jasper, Georgia. In that ad, Gay decries Ossoff for allegedly voting to raise taxes and make things more difficult for her family:
I’m at home raising two boys, while my husband works two jobs and night shifts to pay our bills. Senator Jon Ossoff voted to gut our child tax credit and raise our taxes by $2,000 a year.
As Popular Information notes, this is one of the most “dishonest” ads of the cycle. What Gay is referring to is not a vote by Ossoff to raise anyone’s taxes, but his vote against President Trump’s so-called One Big Beautiful Bill Act (OBBBA), which, among other things, implemented a broad series of tax and spending changes. While it did include a small increase to the child tax credit and other tax cuts that could benefit middle class families, it also included broad cuts to health care coverage and even larger tax cuts for many of the richest Americans. Even if you disagree with Ossoff about the merits of the legislation, voting against a tax cut is not quite the same thing as voting to raise someone’s taxes.
But what’s more interesting is who has been tapped to relay this message. Gay is portrayed as an everyday working mother who is struggling to get by in the economy. The truth is actually more complicated.
Her full name is Lisa Mcpherson Gay, and she is the chair of the Turning Point Action Moms Coalition of Cherokee County. That’s part of the right-wing activist coalition that was chaired by the late Charlie Kirk.
I reached out to Mcpherson Gay to ask her if she was paid by either Turning Point Action or OneNation for her role in the commercial. She did not respond to a request for comment.
While it’s impossible to know exactly what her financial situation is without talking to her, a property search in Jasper, Georgia, suggests that she and her husband own a sizable home. Zillow says the home, built in 2021, has four bedrooms and two bathrooms; its estimated value is $366,000. It’s unlikely that the small increase in the child tax credit would do much to this family’s bottom line; a more than triple increase in health insurance premiums for some residents as a consequence of the OBBBA is likely to be far more destructive.
OneNation is classified as what’s called a 501(c)(4), a type of nonprofit that is not allowed to directly endorse candidates but is allowed to spend money in political ways; one advantage of this type of organization versus a traditional PAC is that it does not have to disclose its donors. So we don’t know exactly who is spending so much money misleading Georgia voters. But with that sizable investment, you can bet that it’s not struggling mothers. OneNation and Turning Point Action did not respond to requests for comment.
While we don’t know who’s paying for OneNation’s ads, we don’t have to guess who is sponsoring commercials supporting Georgia Republican gubernatorial candidate Rick Jackson. Jackson, who serves as the CEO of the health care staffing behemoth Jackson, spent over $100 million of his own money to win his party’s nomination.
Now he’s blanketing the airwaves with tens of millions of dollars from his fortune to defeat former Atlanta Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms, who is the Democratic nominee for governor.
One of those ads features a series of Georgians talking about Lance Bottoms’s tenure as mayor of Atlanta. While it’s fair to raise complaints about the former mayor’s rocky years — she was the chief executive of the city during the beginning of the pandemic and George Floyd-era unrest — what’s curious about the advertisement is how it portrays its interview subjects.
As Democratic activist Seth Taylor notes, many of the interviewees are misleadingly labeled.
Takosha Swan, for instance, was a GOP candidate for Lt. Gov during the 2026 primary (she appears top right in the image collage at the beginning of this article).
Another woman, identified only as Ginger Howard, a “small business owner,” was an official in the Republican National Committee who has spent years working on behalf of the party.
Yet another interviewee, Azad Ahmadi, was as Taylor notes a “committee chair with the Georgia Black Republican Council and reported that he planned to vote for Donald Trump for the third consecutive presidential election.”
None of this is disclosed in the ads. As Collins’s campaign continues to flounder, it’s understandable why Jackson may not want to portray himself as a typical Republican politician. But in his quest to reinvent himself as the champion of everyday Georgians, he’s hiding key details about the people he has enlisted to help him capture the governor’s mansion.
I wonder who the guy is on the forklift in the dishonest Collins’ ad slamming Ossoff for his makeup. He sure doesn’t sound like a guy who makes his living in a foundry. And he doesn’t strike me as a Georgia guy.