McCarthy Goes Up On Air With Six-Figure ‘Lobster Tank’ Ad, Casting Maine Voters as the Investors

Owen McCarthy, the health-tech entrepreneur seeking the Republican nomination for governor, took his first swing at television this week with a 30-second “Shark Tank” parody titled “Lobster Tank” that recasts the people of Maine as the panel of investors and McCarthy himself as the candidate making the pitch.

The ad will come with a “six-figure” spend, a McCarthy campaign official told the Maine Wire, spanning broadcast, cable, connected-TV and digital.

The ad began running Wednesday across the four mediums simultaneously, according to the campaign, which announced the rollout in a Monday press release. The buy is the largest single act of paid communication McCarthy has put up in the race so far, and it lands five and a half weeks before the June 9 Republican primary.

“I’m Owen McCarthy, a business owner and engineer,” he tells the viewer. “Maine has great people but terrible management. … This state isn’t working for our people.” Then comes the pitch: a 70-page policy document the campaign has branded as “Maine 2040,” which McCarthy says delivers “tax cuts, betting on heritage industries, and building for the working class.” The closer is the ad’s only piece of audience participation, delivered straight to the camera: “I’m ready to fix Maine. You in?”

In a written statement accompanying the launch, McCarthy framed the ad — and the plan it sells — as a contrast play against the rest of the seven-candidate Republican field.

“I’m the only candidate in this race with a comprehensive, conservative strategy for how to make Maine work for working people like those I grew up with,” McCarthy said. “After seven years of one-party rule in Augusta, it’s not enough to offer talking points and bumper sticker slogans. This is a crisis moment, and a crisis moment demands bold vision, a real plan, and a leader ready to hit the ground running on day one.”

He returned to the same theme in a second statement: “If you want to ask voters for their support with a straight face, I think you need to tell them exactly what you are going to do as governor. With Maine2040, that’s exactly what I’ve done so voters can hold me accountable. Every candidate owes them that, but I’m the only one to provide it.”

A six-figure statewide buy on broadcast and cable, layered over connected-TV and digital, is a serious deployment of capital with the primary five-and-a-half weeks out.

McCarthy has not been the fundraising leader in the race — Charles and Mason have outpaced the field on that metric, and Bush has the personal capacity to self-fund — but a buy of this size on the mediums Maine households actually consume signals that the McCarthy campaign believes it still has a path through the field.

In a Ranked Choice Voting primary, that path may run through second-choice rankings.

In a seven-candidate field where the most recent Pan Atlantic Research survey put Robert “Bobby” Charles at 26 percent and former State Senate Leader Garrett Mason at 11 percent, with the rest of the field trailing in single digits, no candidate is currently positioned to clear 50 percent on first-choice ballots. The lowest-finishing candidate gets eliminated and that candidate’s ballots redistribute to second choices, with the process repeating until a candidate clears the threshold.

The April Maine Republican Party convention straw poll, which the party declared Charles the winner of, recorded 269 votes for Charles, 230 for fitness executive Ben Midgley, 96 for health exec Jonathan Bush, 76 for Mason, 74 for McCarthy, 54 for Robert Wessels, and 45 for David.

In a ranked-choice race that nominates a candidate by accumulating second- and third-choice rankings, “Lobster Tank” is exactly the kind of asset a campaign in McCarthy’s position needs: a 30-second introduction to voters who haven’t yet heard of him, paid for at scale, in the four weeks before the rounds of redistribution begin.