It certainly wasn’t the first ad to go up on TV, but this one might start the dominoes-a-fallin’.

Bruce Poliquin will be up with his first television ad of the primary season this Tuesday.  Susan Cover reports that the ad, like most of Poliquin’s campaign messaging, will focus on the economy, and “competent fiscal management”.

The only ads that have run on tv so far are from Republican Les Otten, who has put up a couple different ads touting himself as a potential “job creator in chief”, and another one about, high taxes, or something.  Neither commercial really did much convincing among the primary electorate (in fact it was treated quite skeptically by most people), but it certainly did raise Otten’s name ID.

But the dynamic is a little bit different now.  There are only three months left before the primary is held, and now is essentially the time that major contenders need to start introducing themselves to the voters using mass media.  Poliquin wants to get a head start on that, obviously – but it can’t be long before we see more from Otten, and we start to see the first ads from LePage, Abbott, Jacobson, and the others as well.

I don’t have a copy of the Poliquin script yet (I’ll pass along once I do), but I can expect it will talk about his experience as a “business manager”, the need for Augusta to have said business manager come in and audit state government, make it efficient, and - please God no – get our “fiscal house in order“.  Something in that general theme is what I would expect to see.  I do not expect any kind of innovative or creative ad – at least not at this point.

Pine Tree Politics will post the commercial when it goes live online.