January 08, 2011 12:52 AM UTC

The 2012 Campaign Season Starts...NOW!

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• by: Colorado Pols

Have you finished reflecting on the 2010 election season? We hope so, because 2010 is totally old news already.

As our friends at “The Fix” explain, the paid advertising has already begun in the 2012 North Dakota Senate race:

Outside groups aligned with both parties are already advertising in North Dakota, an early sign of the potential competitiveness of the state’s Senate race and of the likely heavy spending by third party groups on contests around the country in 2012.

Commonsense Ten, a group founded last cycle by Democratic operatives Jim Jordan, Monica Dixon and Jeff Forbes, is spending $30,000 on radio ads defending the record of Sen. Kent Conrad (D-N.D.). The ads begin today…

…The ads referred to in the Commonsense Ten spot are being paid for by the American Future Fund, an Iowa-based conservative outfit. The AFF commercials, which the group is spending $60,000 on over two weeks, remind North Dakotans that Conrad said back in 1986 that “he would resign if the budget deficit hadn’t fallen.”…

…Jordan, a former executive director of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, said his group’s ads were an early attempt to combat the vast spending edge of GOP-aligned organizations in 2010.