Nunn ad slams Perdue for profiting as workers lost jobs

Former charity executive Michelle Nunn’s (D) campaign is out with a hard-hitting ad featuring former textile workers who lost their jobs after businessman David Perdue (R) took over their company.

{mosads}The spot focuses on Perdue’s short stint at Pillowtex, a North Carolina company that was shuttered shortly after he left. Former workers hit him for profiting while they suffered.

“He walked away, with his $1.7 million and didn’t care about if we had a dollar in our pockets,” one former millworker says in the ad.

“All we were was people to make money off our backs,” says another.

Perdue’s tenure at Pillowtex was already used as campaign fodder by his primary opponents, and will likely be a main line of attack against him as Nunn looks to pull herself even with the Republican, who has led in recent polling.

Perdue was chairman and CEO of Pillowtex for about 8 months. He came in as the company (and all of the American textile industry) was already struggling and says he left after he realized he couldn’t salvage the company, making $1.7 million in the process. The company closed down shortly thereafter.

Perdue’s campaign hit back against the ad.

“Instead of debating the issues that matter to Georgians, Michelle Nunn is recycling old attacks against David Perdue that have already been dismissed. We expect no less from the hand-picked candidate of Barack Obama and Harry Reid,” said Perdue spokeswoman Megan Whittemore.

“David Perdue continues to gain momentum and today we saw yet another poll showing that Georgians agree we need a different approach to fighting the culture of waste and dysfunction in Washington, not more of the same,” she continued.

Nunn’s decision to go hard negative on him suggests that her campaign believes she needs to make up some ground.

A SurveyUSA poll released Tuesday found Perdue leading by 9 points, though the poll’s methodology is a bit unusual and the sample is only 26 percent African-American, lower than Democrats expect it to be in the election. Other recent polling has also found Perdue ahead.

This post was updated at 1:40 p.m.