I’ve never lived in a swing state before so I mostly saw political ads on the Daily Show or some late night talk show.
THIS election cycle, I live in Virginia and we are not only a swing state, we have a hotly contested senatorial race between two former governors of Virginia.
Getting 5 or 6 calls from pollsters or campaigners is bad enough. I can’t turn on the TV, radio or internet without seeing a political ad. Maybe its because I’m a Democrat now and the vast majority of the ads are Republican but its waaaay too much. I wish there was some way for cable and internet technology to hypertarget their audience so that they know that I am going to vote party line Democrat so that my TV ads will be for the new model year of cars, my radio ads will be for local businesses and my internet ads will be for penis enlargement again.
I was just watching tv and I saw 4 political ads in a row and then trailer for looper. Then I logged on to watch the webisodes of walking dead and every single one of them had a political ad attached to them and all the ads in the margins were political ads except for one pimping cruises.
I watch network television for about 30 minutes most days–namely, Jeopardy!–and I am not in a swing state, so I get spared the worst of the ads. But my TV stations come from Lexington, the heart of the KY 6th, where Blue Dog Congressman Ben Chandler is in a tight race with second-time Republican challenger Andy Barr. This was the series of ads we were subjected to:
#1: Barr releases an ad featuring a guy dressed as a coal miner talking about how horrible Chandler’s agenda has been for the coal industry, and that he’ll put all kinds of coal miners out of work. #2: Chandler responds with an ad stating that the “coal miner” in the ad was in fact a wealthy executive from the other end of KY and a big Republican donor. #3: Barr responds with an ad in which (what appear to be) actual coal miners say that the guy was in fact a coal miner and that Chandler should be ashamed for saying otherwise. In fact, Barr made more than one ad on this theme and ran them hard.
The truth is that the guy used to be a miner but is now, as Chandler says, an executive and major GOP donor. But what kills me about all of this is there is not a single coal mine in the KY 6th. If they’re going to squabble like this, I wish they’d at least squabble about something that directly affects their own constituents.
So I’ve barely watched enough TV to see the ads and I’m thoroughly sick already. I can’t imagine how people in really competitive states feel.
Here in California…about as far from a swing state as one could get…there is a really nasty little bit of a Proposition, Prop 32, which would ostensibly remove PAC money from elections. It prevents corporations or unions from taking money from workers’ paychecks. But since this wouldn’t actually affect corporations – because that isn’t how they fund PACs – it is actually nothing more than a union-busting measure. And probably unconstitutional anyway, so we’ll have to go through the whole cycle of getting it thrown out.
The ads are incessant. GAWD, this is an irritating time to live in America!
Negative ads may work to get elections won, but once they’re won the losing constituency hates the elected candidate so much it undercuts their ‘mandate’ and congressional harmony as a whole.
Negative political ads are really just bad for everyone but ad agencies.
A month to go. Please let it be over. I don’t even answer the phone anymore because Romney calls at least 3 times a day. If I was a Romney supporter I would be seriously reconsidering. I’ve chased away two Obama pushers. One banged on my door like a police raid at 9:30 one night and was dressed and bearded like a homeless person. Obama is trying hard to lose my vote too.
All you pollsters and political junkies remember, there are third party candidates I will give my vote too if you keep it up.
Less than one month to go before its over. And then starts up again in 2 years for the next mid-terms. 2 years is not a long enough vacation from this shit.
I haven’t seen any presidential ones but I’ve seen a bunch dealing with Jose Hernandez and the 10th district, which makes it doubly-annoying in that I don’t even live in the 10th.
Wow, they come and knock on doors–what a nuisance. I was coming in here to bitch about these stupid ass emails I keep getting from Romney and Ryan that start out: "Friend, we have a lot of work to do . . . " First of all, I’m not your fucking friend, so stop spamming me, so I can go back to actually getting some work done.
*The New York Times * reported today that Las Vegas set the record for political ads - at 73,000. Commercial breaks for SNL sold out. Local news is actually shortening their programming to give space to the commercials.
$70 million reserved in commercial time by both campaigns from October 15 until Election Day. That works out to $3 million being spend on commercials per day.
