As Republican candidates take the stage on Wednesday night for the next presidential debate, Hillary Clinton will begin airing a series of issue-based television ads featuring working women.

The four ads, each of which centers around a female protagonist, address middle class priorities such as instituting equal pay, expanding college affordability and raising incomes. Clinton provides a voiceover but does not appear directly in the ads, which will air on broadcast and cable in the key early voting states of Iowa and New Hampshire, according to a Clinton aide.



“On average, women need to work an extra two hours each day to earn the same paycheck as their male co-workers,” Clinton says in one ad.

“The top 25 hedge fund managers make more than all of the kindergarten teachers in America combined,” she notes in another.

The ads offer Clinton a prime opportunity, when millions will be tuning into the third Republican debate, to contrast her candidacy with those of the candidates onstage in Boulder, Colorado. The Republican candidates have uniformly dismissed, for example, equal pay as an issue – a point Clinton often highlights on the campaign trail.

Democrats have also criticized the tax plans of candidates like former Florida governor Jeb Bush and Florida senator Marco Rubio as disproportionately favoring the wealthy.

Previous campaign ads aired by Clinton have similarly cast the former secretary of state as a fighter whose agenda is focused on reducing income inequality and lifting the middle class as the US continues to recover economically from the depths of the recession.

In Iowa and New Hampshire, Clinton faces a competitive challenge in the Democratic primary from Vermont senator Bernie Sanders. Both candidates have discussed college affordability at length, albeit with differing proposals for how to ease the burden of students.

Clinton’s ads are nonetheless marked by an air of simplicity, in that each spot introduces an issue and closes with Clinton’s voice asking voters to “join the fight”. There is no mention of the views of rival parties or candidates.

The ads also provide Clinton with an opportunity to further capitalize on what has been the strongest month of her campaign thus far. She has enjoyed a sizable boost – both in terms of ratings and fundraising dollars – since the first Democratic presidential debate earlier this month, as well as her testimony last week on the September 2012 attacks in Benghazi, Libya, before a Republican-led congressional committee.