With just over a month to go, the race for New York State Governor is … not really heating up all that much. Republican challenger Rob Astorino has been consistently lagging in the polls by more than 20 points despite the ethical problems dogging Andrew Cuomo and the sorry state of affairs in the Empire State. There have been the usual number of political advertisements cropping up on nearly every channel, but this week I saw one which brought me up short. It looked for all the world like the famous (or infamous) “Daisy ad” from Johnson’s presidential campaign when I was a young boy. At first I assumed that it was a news show running some sort of historical piece, but it turned out to be an actual ad. A quick check showed that the New York media had picked up on it the day before.

Republican Rob Astorino is going nuclear in his effort to oust heavily favored Democratic incumbent Andrew Cuomo in the race for governor.

Astorino claims in a provocative new TV spot — his own take on the infamous “daisy girl’’ attack ad that helped Lyndon Johnson trounce Barry Goldwater in the 1964 presidential election — that Cuomo could wind up in prison because of a federal criminal probe targeting a “cloud of corruption” hovering over the governor’s office.

I’ll include the video below, but I have to wonder what’s going on in Astorino’s campaign office. Or maybe I’m overreacting? Any politico will tell you this was one of the most despised ads of the era. (And Johnson’s team only ran it once, though it lives on today on the internet.) But how many rank and file voters have ever heard of it? And the material was definitely shocking for 1964, but there’s worse images in half the cartoons you see in 2014.

Perhaps it’s not so over the top as the original. But then we come to the more important question… does a move like this do any good or shift the needle in the race? That’s difficult to imagine in this contest. In any event, here’s the advertisement so you can judge for yourself.

“Jail” FINAL :30 from Rob Astorino on Vimeo.