According to his last financial disclosure, Bill Binnie has dumped in another $500,000 of his own money into his flailing campaign. Sources close to his campaign report that Binnie has upped his final media buy to nearly $400,000, including $300,000 on Boston TV. Binnie is the only GOP candidate to run ads on Boston TV this cycle.

Ovide Lamontagne, on the other hand, is running on fumes. As of August 25th, Ovide had $109,000 cash on hand; $44,000, however, was for the general election only. He also had $36,000 in debt, and since that time has spent at least $38,000. That puts him in the red. According to campaign sources, Ovide is spending just $24,000 on TV the final week, a far cry from the amount it would take to make him a credible contender.

When the story first broke in the Union Leader, Binnie said that he never shipped jobs to Mexico. He said that when the California plant closed, he oped a new plant down the road and all of the workers retained their jobs.

In a follow up story, when presented with his company’s own annual report that specifically said “relocated the Santa Ana, California plant to Tijuana, Mexico, a report that bears Binnie’s signature, Binnie then said that “both things are true”, that some of the jobs went to Mexico and some went to the new plant down the road from the old one.

Binnie then went back to denying the story altogether, claiming the entire affair was a case of mistaken identity. He said that while he owned A&E Plastics, a company by the name of A&E Systems was actually the one that shut a plant in Santa Ana, California close to his plant and that company was the one that moved jobs to Mexico.

Binnie then released an email saying that after he closed the California plant he shipped manufacturing machines from that plant to the one in Mexico, but not jobs. Of course, if someone was operating the machine in California, and a different person then operated it in Mexico, this is a tacit acknowledgment that he did in fact ship jobs to Mexico.

Binnie has also claimed that while Gary Rayno admitted that the Union Leader had made an error in its reporting and would grant a retraction, that retraction was vetoed by Joe McQuaid. Gary Rayno denied this is true.

And finally, Binnie claimed in the Portsmouth Herald that he didn’t even know the Union Leader was working on a jobs to Mexico story when they first contacted him, saying that the first he heard about it was when he read it in the newspaper. Gary Rayno said that this was not true, saying that both he and John Distaso asked Binnie directly about it. And of course, when one reads that first Union Leader story, one can’t help but notice that Binnie is quoted in it SEVEN TIMES, each time denying that he shipped jobs to Mexico.

Now! Hampshire now has an exclusive report that shows that in addition to this, Binnie job creation claims are wildly exaggerated.

To start, Binnie on several occasions has claimed to have created “thousands and thousands and thousands” of jobs. Binnie claims that when he sold his company to Tyco in 1996, it had over 3,000 employees. Actually, it had 2,500 employees at the time of its sale, and 550 were in Mexico, according to his company’s own annual reports.

So how many of those did Binnie create? To start, certainly not all of the 2,500. Binnie was in the business of Leverage Buyouts. He purchased several companies and formed them into a plastics conglomerate. So the first question is, how many jobs did those companies already have when he bought them and merged them into Carlisle Plastics.

In an interview with the Union Leader, Binnie said the companies he bought had 1,200 employees. Using his own numbers, that means that Binnie created 1,300 jobs by the time he sold the company. And since 550 of those jobs were at the Mexican plant, Binnie created no more than 750 jobs in the United States. Of course, included in that 750 are the jobs that Binnie also had in his Asian branches as well, but Now! Hampshire is unable to determine exactly how many of those jobs were overseas.

So based on Binnie’s own numbers, his job creation stands at hundreds, not thousands, of jobs.

But did Binnie really buy companies with only 1,200 existing employees and not more?

Based upon Binnie’s company’s own annual reports, Now! Hampshire is able to determine the following. Carlisle Plastics was formed when Binnie bought and merged Rex Plastics and Bercon Packaging, and the company was incorporated in 1985; in 1989, the name was changed to Carlisle Plastics. In 1988, Binnie bought CDSW; CDSW already owned A&E Plastics which also contained and Asian division, A&E Far East. In 1989, Binnie merged Carlisle and CDSW.

According to public documents, by the end of 1989, Carlisle had 1,550 employees, the results of these acquisitions and mergers. By the end of 1990, a year later, the number of employees jumped to 2,600. Where did all of these jobs come from? Did Binnie really double the number of jobs at the company in only a year?

Not likely. In March of 1990 Binnie bought American Western Corporation. Many of the jobs that Carlisle showed at the end of 1990 were the result of this merger. And from 1990 until the sale of his company in 1996, Binnie actually had a net loss of 100 jobs, as it declined from 2,600 to 2,500 in that time period.

So based upon these numbers, it is likely that the number can be reduced further, likely in the low hundreds. Not that this is bad; anyone who creates even one job deserves kudos. But it is indeed a far cry from the “thousands and thousands and thousands” that Binnie has been claiming on the stump.

But a multi-person field is tricky, because when you go negative you also drive up your unfavorables too. And whereas that doesn’t matter in a two person race, in a large field with more options, your voters can leave you and go to a third option that you are not attacking.

And therein lies Bill Binnie’s problem. He took a poll a few weeks back, realized he was losing to Kelly Ayotte and decided to rip her to pieces. He has thrown the kitchen sink at her in an act of desperation, cycling in one negative ad after another in the hopes that something sticks. Whether or not he is driving up Ayotte’s negatives remains to be seen, but he is certainly driving up his own. If voters had no other place to go, it wouldn’t matter, but in this race they have other otpions and it is causing problems for Binnie.

Binnie’s message is jobs, plain and simple. He used to have a laser-like focus on this issue, but he hasn’t talked about it in weeks. Most of his ads are negative now and the only positive one is about making English the official language of the U.S., a position everyone supports. Who knows if it is hurting Ayotte, but it is definitely hurting him. The narrative has sunk in that he threw the first punch and is slinging mud. Newspaper accounts, word of mouth, insider buzz all recount how voters are being turned off by Binnie’s ads. And Binnie’s fight with the Union Leader and the NH GOP doesn’t help matters either.

And just as this is happening, Bender makes his move. He is the other businessman in this race, has stayed positive, and now has a very effective ad up that touts his record on jobs; that used to be Binnie’s message. So as voters become turned off on Binnie, due to his own ads and Ayotte’s very effective counter-punch, they look around for someone else to support and there’s Bender.

Bender’s new ad is very good, his best so far. If he puts serious money behind it he can cause some serious problems for Binnie. And if in his next ad he points out that while he created jobs in NH, Binnie created jobs in Mexico, that could be all she wrote.

The NH scene has been buzzing about the strength of the Ayotte machine for the past few weeks, and there have been several newspaper columns and posts on other blogs giving Team Ayotte their rightful props. Binnie’s organization, on the other hand, pales in comparison. Binnie has decided to rely on TV ads and forego the tedious but necessary work of building a grassroots infrastructure and making phone calls and knocking on doors. If the election between Ayotte and Binnie is close going into the final weekend, smart money is that Ayotte’s organization easily pulls her over the finish line.

In a recent poll, sources say that among the verbatims was the response of one individual who said he was going to vote for “Bill Bender”.

Tille is a well-known and well-respected political operative who brought credibility and an understanding of NH to the Bender campaign. Losing him is a blow. As one campaign staffer who is working on another campaign put it, “It’s a game changer.”

It is unclear the extent to which the info that Binnie is pushing is true. Regardless, the Binnie camp clearly sees Bender as a threat and is seeking to minimize his impact on the race. As was previously reported by Now! Hampshire, Binnie and Bender are having a tough time distinguishing themselves, as they are both moderate businessmen running on their business records, and their names both begin with the letter “B”.

Now! Hampshire has learned that Bender is starting to zero in on Binnie. Media sources report that the Bender camp, and even Bender himself, have started to push negative information about Binnie to the press, most notably that Binnie’s job creation claims are completely false. The Bender camp notes that while Binnie says that he has created thousands of jobs, he doesn’t tell voters that the jobs were all outsourced to places like Mexico.

Bender’s strategy is obvious and a smart one. Binnie has made his business background the entire rationale for his campaign, a rationale that is attractive to a certain number of GOP voters. There aren’t enough votes there to fuel two business candidates, so one of them will likely have to take the other out.

Most observers feel that while former AG Kelly Ayotte remains the front-runner, country club owner Bill Binnie is her nearest competitor. And that’s where Bender can become dangerous for Binnie. By dividing the “businessman vote”, he can play the role of spoiler.

And Bender certainly has the resources to do exactly that. Bender has money to spend, having already lent his campaign hundreds of thousands of dollars. And he has run a vigorous, aggressive campaign; his last round of ads featuring Uncle Sam “eating” taxpayer dollars were the talk of the town. He is certainly capable of capturing a significant share of the vote, and every percentage point he gets he will be taking directly from Binnie.