During Republican Debate, Hillary Clinton to Air Ads Focusing on Women

Hillary Rodham Clinton’s campaign will air four new ads in Iowa and New Hampshire during tonight’s Republican presidential debate, spots that tell the stories of different women fighting for pay equity or college affordability without focusing on Mrs. Clinton.

The spots are different from anything her team has aired so far. She does not appear in the ads, instead narrating the stories of women whose names and professions appear on the screen. The ads wind together issues that have become touchstones for the Democratic party with Mrs. Clinton’s theme of “fighting” for people.

In one spot, Mrs. Clinton says that it took a woman named Alexis four years to get a college degree, “but it will take her 25 years to pay off her student loans.”

In another, about Sara, described as a senior business analyst, Mrs. Clinton says that “on average women need to work an extra two hours each day to earn the same paycheck as their male coworkers,” and urges people to “join the fight for equal pay. Join the fight for Sara.”

A third focuses on a kindergarten teacher, and a fourth on a cardiac nurse.

The spots are clearly aimed at framing the Democratic party as one that will fight for women’s economic issues against the Republicans, whose debates have barely touched on such topics. And Mrs. Clinton’s early ads have been criticized privately by some senior Democrats as unmemorable biographical spots that have not broken through the clutter of television advertisements.

But the new ones also focus attention away from Mrs. Clinton, who has sometimes been faulted for turning the discussion to herself too frequently.

“These ads are bold, and distinctive because the candidate doesn’t appear in them except as narrator,” said the pollster Geoff Garin, who worked on Mrs. Clinton’s 2008 presidential campaign and who is now working with Priorities USA Action, the “super PAC” supporting her. “And more importantly, these ads really take the idea that ‘It’s not about me, it’s about you’ very seriously.”

Mrs. Clinton’s overall approval ratings have gone down since she began her campaign. But if she has a strong showing with women, it not only boosts her in a general election, but makes the path for her main Democratic rival, Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont, more complicated.

Some Republican strategists conceded the ads are effective and show that she is trying to shore up her base, even as they argued that Mrs. Clinton is painting the G.O.P. unfairly over the equal pay bill.

“Republicans are sort of whistling past the graveyard if they don’t think she’s a force to be reckoned with,” said Katie Packer Gage, a political strategist who founded the firm Burning Glass Consulting, which focuses on helping Republican candidates communicate with women voters.