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Mitch McConnell’s Ad-Maker Mistakes Duke Blue Devils for Kentucky Wildcats

It only lasted a few seconds, but one shot in a Web video released Tuesday by Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell’s 2014 campaign caught the attention of eagle-eyed college hoops fans.  

The video highlighted the Kentucky Republican who would become majority leader in a GOP-led Senate, but a video montage of bluegrass greatness included shots of the basketball teams from the University Louisville and (gasp) Duke University. That’s not the NCAA champion blue-and-white team the ad makers had in mind. It should have featured the University of Kentucky Wildcats, of course.  

(Screenshot)
(Screenshot)

“The ad was intended to highlight Kentucky’s basketball dominance and obviously the web ad vendor has become so accustomed to watching national championship celebrations in the bluegrass state that they made a mistake with one of the images,” McConnell campaign spokeswoman Allison Moore said in an email. “Obviously we were horrified by the error and quickly changed it.”  

It’s not a mistake McConnell, an avid sports fan, would have made himself. After Rick Pitino and the Louisville Cardinals won the 2013 championship, McConnell pulled off something of a coup, getting the Senate to declare in a resolution that Kentucky is “rightly known as the college basketball capital of the world.”  

But the mishap makes a tweet from McConnell’s Democratic challenger, Kentucky Secretary of State Alison Lundergan Grimes, appear prophetic:

The Cardinals and Wildcats are set to renew their rivalry Friday night in the Sweet 16 in Indianapolis, in a four-seed versus eight-seed matchup that looks nothing like a battle of underdogs. Duke went home early.

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