During a primary, candidates from the same party take shots at each other. Some get pretty brutal, but I don’t really want to get in the topic of whether this is good or bad.
Have those primary quotes/topics ever been used at the general election? A Republican or Democrat showing ads of quotes from the opposing candidate’s primary: “See, this is what his/her OWN PARTY said about him/her?”
The most famous such instance in modern history is no doubt George H.W. Bush’s characterization of supply-side economics as “voodoo economics” while running against Ronald Reagan in 1980. I don’t believe film of the quote was ever used in a campaign ad (Bush later denied that he had said it, until NBC dug up its archival footage), but the remark was widely quoted by Democrats after Bush signed on as Reagan’s running mate.
As far as “raising a topic” is concerned, it was Al Gore, while running against Micheal Dukakis in the 1988 primaries, who first raised the controversial Massachusetts prison furlough program as an issue. (Dukakis had vetoed a bill which would have ended furloughs for first-degree murderers.) Republicans thus learned of the issue and personalized it by adding the story of Willie Horton, a first-degree murderer who had escaped while on furlough and committed further crimes. Even given the primitive state of opposition research in 1988, however, Republicans probably would have discovered the issue anyway. It had been the subject of a Pulitzer Prize-winning series by a Massachusetts newspaper the previous year.