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CHARLOTTE, N.C. -- The Indiana Senate race continues to remain highly competitive, and the moderate Democratic group Center Forward is pouring in over a half a million dollars on a new television advertisement portraying Republican nominee Richard Mourdock as extreme.

The ad attacks Mourdock on Medicare, portraying him as out of the mainstream in the Hoosier State. It's airing in all the major markets reaching the state from Sept. 6-23, including Indianapolis, Evansville, Terre Haute, Louisville and Cincinnati.

"There's radical, and then there's Richard Mourdock. Even though you paid into Medicare every paycheck and depend on it, Mourdock thinks Medicare is unconstitutional. He said a plan that essentially ends Medicare doesn't go far enough. Worse, Mourdock thinks it's okay for employers to deny coverage for cancer treatment," a narrator in the ad intones. "The Mourdock way: the wrong way for Indiana."

Mourdock, running as the unabashed conservative, handily defeated Sen. Richard Lugar, R-Ind., in the GOP primary, but is facing a more difficult time against the Democratic nominee, Rep. Joe Donnelly, a member of the Blue Dog Coalition. National Democrats have caricatured Mourdock as being to the right of most Indiana voters.

Two partisan polls conducted in early August -- one by the Democratic firm Garin-Hart-Yang Research Group for Center Forward and Majority PAC, the other by Market Research Insight for the state Chamber of Commerce -- showed the two candidates running neck-and-neck.