Democratic gubernatorial hopeful Bob Ferguson goes up on television with spot introducing himself to voters

Bob Fer­gu­son is ready to for­mal­ly intro­duce him­self to voters.

The fron­trun­ner in the con­test to pick a suc­ces­sor to Gov­er­nor Jay Inslee today kicked off the long-antic­i­pat­ed vot­er con­tact phase of his 2024 cam­paign with a six-fig­ure ad buy sup­port­ing a one-minute tele­vi­sion spot dubbed “Always Around.” 

The ad por­trays Fer­gu­son, the state’s attor­ney gen­er­al, both at home and out and about with his fam­i­ly while he dis­cuss­es two of his cam­paign goals — name­ly, low­er­ing Wash­ing­to­ni­ans’ costs and mak­ing them safer in their com­mu­ni­ties. Take a look:

Here’s a tran­script pro­vid­ed by the Fer­gu­son campaign:

I grew up in a big fam­i­ly. My Mom was a pub­lic school spe­cial edu­ca­tion teacher, and my Dad worked at Boe­ing. They were always around — for us. 

It’s hard­er than ever for fam­i­lies to do the same.

Sky­rock­et­ing costs and ris­ing crime are mak­ing times real­ly tough.

I am run­ning for gov­er­nor so fam­i­lies have an eas­i­er time mak­ing ends meet, and our loved ones, like Jack and Katie, have a safe and secure future.

I’ll work to low­er costs, invest in tech­ni­cal edu­ca­tion and appren­tice­ships, and I’ll hire more police offi­cers. So we’ll com­bat crime, improve pub­lic safe­ty, and get those in cri­sis the care they need.

It won’t be easy. But I’ve nev­er been sat­is­fied with the sta­tus quo. I refuse con­tri­bu­tions from big cor­po­ra­tions, so my focus will be get­ting things done for Wash­ing­ton, not pow­er­ful interests. 

Togeth­er, we’ll make our state safer and more afford­able, so we can all spend more time with our fam­i­lies and build a stronger future for everyone.

The ad is run­ning on both net­work tele­vi­sion and cable chan­nels begin­ning today.

A sim­i­lar­ly-themed ad cre­at­ed by Frank Greer’s shop for Jay Inslee in 2012 has been cred­it­ed with cat­a­pult­ing Inslee past Repub­li­can rival Rob McKen­na, part­ly because after the ad began run­ning around this time twelve years ago, Inslee’s can­di­da­cy got a bump in pub­lic polling and he soon over­took McKen­na to become the fron­trun­ner. If you haven’t seen that ad or missed it all those years ago, you can watch it below:

Accord­ing to NPI’s research, Bob Fer­gu­son is already ahead of his like­ly gen­er­al elec­tion oppo­nent, for­mer Con­gress­man Dave Reichert, by six points. So while he is bet­ter posi­tioned at this junc­ture than Inslee was for the gen­er­al elec­tion, he still stands to ben­e­fit from for­mal­ly intro­duc­ing him­self to vot­ers as a guber­na­to­r­i­al candidate. 

NPI plans to poll the guber­na­to­r­i­al con­test again in less than a month. By that time, many Wash­ing­ton vot­ers will have seen Fer­gu­son’s ads, and we’ll get a sense of whether “Always Around” is pos­i­tive­ly impact­ing his elec­toral trajectory. 

Fer­gu­son’s Demo­c­ra­t­ic rival Mark Mul­let tried to bol­ster his own prospects by going up on the air a few weeks ago, but our polling in May sug­gest­ed that his tele­vi­sion ad push did not move the nee­dle for him at all. Mul­let now lacks the resources to be mean­ing­ful­ly up on tele­vi­sion dur­ing the crit­i­cal weeks lead­ing up to the Top Two elec­tion, when vot­ers are more engaged due to the near­ness of the bal­lot return deadline.