This will do wonders for the overall tone of the election, won’t it? From WaPo:
Republicans are planning to spend the vast majority of their sizable financial war chest over the final 60 days of the campaign attacking Democratic House and Senate candidates over personal issues and local controversies, GOP officials said.
The National Republican Congressional Committee, which this year dispatched a half-dozen operatives to comb through tax, court and other records looking for damaging information on Democratic candidates, plans to spend more than 90 percent of its $50 million-plus advertising budget on what officials described as negative ads.
There’s a snazzy term for this nastiness: “Opposition Research”. Evidently, the point of the exercise is to attack the other guy so that voters will think maybe the challenger isn’t as nice a person as the incumbent.
Because challengers tend to be little-known compared with incumbents, they are more vulnerable to having their public image framed by the opposition through attacks and unflattering personal revelations.
Obviously the technique wasn’t invented for this particular campaign, but for it to be the party’s main campaign strategy??? That’s really sad, folks. The Republicans are behind in the polls and the solution is to let fly with as much mud as possible. Lovely.
Obviously, it’s time to shut the television off, at least until after the elections.