McConnell to air campaign ad - starring his wife

Updated: 10:25 a.m. ET

Sen. Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., the embattled Republican Senate Minority Leader who is up for re-election next year, is out with his first campaign ad of the 2014 cycle - and it features his wife, Elaine Chao, blasting a liberal group for making much-maligned comments about her ethnicity last month.

"You've seen the ads attacking my husband," Chao says, in a 30-second spot that will air statewide in Kentucky starting Thursday. "As Mitch McConnell's wife, I've learned to expect them. Now, far-left special interests are also attacking my ethnicity, even attacking Mitch's patriotism, because he's married to me."

The group, Progress Kentucky, suggested in a series of Twitter messages last month that jobs are moving China because Chao is of Chinese descent. Ultimately, the group took down the posts and apologized for comments McConnell targeted as "racial slurs."

Chao, who served as labor secretary during George W. Bush's presidency, said even such "attacks" couldn't change her and McConnell's shared "love" of Kentucky.

"Mitch works his heart out to protect Kentucky from Washington's bad ideas because Mitch loves Kentucky. We love Kentucky," she said in the ad. "The meanest personal attacks can never change that."

Twenty months out from the election, the six-figure ad buy serves as a reminder that McConnell's re-election campaign is expected to be high profile and contentious from the get-go -- not least because actress Ashley Judd is considering a bid. Democrats immediately seized on the ad as evidence that the incumbent senator is the "least popular incumbent senator in the entire country."

"Mitch McConnell is known as the meanest, most negative campaigner in all of Washington, and Kentuckians and all Americans are sick and tired of his nasty, partisan brand of politics," said Matt Canter, a spokesman for the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee (DSCC), in a statement today. "We strongly disagree with the tweet that Mitch McConnell is referencing in his new ad, but let's be honest: Mitch McConnell is not a victim. In fact, he is the reason for Washington's dysfunction."