Denver, CO Mayor: With two weeks to go before the June 4 general election and with ballots being mailed to voters this week, Mayor Michael Hancock is going up with the first negative TV spot of the race. The narrator hits urban planner Jamie Giellis, who like Hancock is a Democrat, and declares that “like Trump, (Giellis) called undocumented immigrants criminals.” The commercial then shows footage of Giellis saying, “Yes, we won’t tolerate crime or criminal activities, we will comply with authorities, we will comply with ICE.”
The Denver Post’s Andrew Kenney notes that this clip leaves out the rest of the candidate’s quote, where Giellis continues saying “but immigrants and people coming into our community do provide rich opportunity and diversity that we see other cities really working with.” Kenney also points out that, despite what the spot says, Giellis did not call undocumented immigrants “criminals.” Giellis referred to “illegal actions,” but Kenney writes that she “did not say that undocumented immigrants as a group are criminals.”
The commercial goes on to take advantage of two recent stories that have been unwelcome distractions for Giellis. First, it shows a clip of her mistakenly suggesting that the acronym for the NAACP stands for “National African American” before she’s told she’s wrong. Giellis then is shown laughing and she asks, “You going to test me on this?”
Last week, Giellis did indeed unsuccessfully struggle to remember what NAACP stands for. The following day, she said that she remembered that the civil rights organization's name stands for "National Association for the Advancement of Colored People" just after the interview ended, and she apologized for her "momentary lapse."
The ad’s narrator then accuses Giellis of “deleting racially incentive tweets to hide her past views.” That’s a reference to a 2009 Giellis tweet that surfaced last week where she asked, "Here's a question: Why do so many cities feel it necessary to have a 'Chinatown'?" Giellis quickly deleted her Twitter and Instagram accounts, saying she was "coming into the realization that we're a public figure, and it was a private account."