Pat McCrory planned to go on the air after Labor Day.
The Republican gubernatorial candidate said today that he was forced to begin airing his own ad today because of an ad run by the Alliance for North Carolina attacking his record.
"We did feel like we need to let the public know that much of this ad was very misleading and very inaccurate," he said.
He called the Alliance, a 527 funded by a teachers' union and the Democratic Governors Association, a "very mysterious group" based in Washington, D.C.
He also said it was "extremely inappropriate" that the ad instructed viewers to call the Charlotte mayor's office, which has received about 300 calls during the past two weeks.
"The good news is over 60 percent of those calls have actually been people very upset about the ad and ... wanting to inform me of their support for the campaign," he said.
McCrory's ad notes that he has been attacked, but does not directly rebut the Alliance ad. Campaign consultant Jack Hawke said that they did not want to get into a "tit for tat" argument with an outside group.
The McCrory campaign intends to spend $150,000 over the next 10 days airing the ads in the same markets as the Alliance ad — essentially the state's major urban areas except for Charlotte.
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