TEA Party’s Peg Dunmire Commits $250,000 to Campaign, Unveils Second TV Commercial

The TEA Party’s Peg Dunmire, who recently committed a quarter of a million dollars of her own money in Florida’s hotly-contested eighth congressional district race against liberal Democratic firebrand Alan Grayson and Republican challenger Daniel Webster, has released her second television commercial of the campaign.

A previous Dunmire ad featured voters belonging to the two major parties who said that they were opting to vote for the TEA Party candidate this year, and concluded with the former hospital administrator and ex-Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin pictured together.

Dubbed “Year of the Tea Party Woman,” Dunmire’s new 30-second spot, produced by Cinematic Expressions, an Orlando-based video production company, began airing on television stations in the Central Florida district yesterday.

The ad can be seen here.

A Sunshine State News Poll released on Wednesday shows Webster, a former state senator, leading Grayson, a spectacularly outspoken and fiery freshman congressman, by a margin of 43-36.

Dunmire, whose campaign reportedly raised nearly $49,000 through June 30, polled six percent of the vote in the survey of 559 likely voters while three percent of those polled preferred George Metcalfe, a little-known Eustis lawyer who’s running as an independent.

One in every ten Republicans polled favored the insurgent Dunmire over Webster, a 28-year veteran of the state legislature and the first Republican Speaker of the Florida House of Representatives since Reconstruction.

While waging one of the most spirited third-party congressional campaigns in recent history, the 63-year-old Dunmire has steadfastly maintained that she’s not a spoiler and is running to win in what is shaping up as one of the most closely-watched U.S. House races in the country.