According to thegazette.com, Iowans are being inundated with advertising related to the race for the US Senate seat of retiring Tom Harkin (D-IA), but very little of it is of the home grown variety.
According to the report, since the primaries $14M has been spent on advertising and probably less than $2.5M has come from the actual candidates.
Democrat Bruce Braley is said to have provided only about 14% of the cash spent on his behalf, and Republican Joni Ernst has provided only about 20%.
Another $2.5M is expected to go into advertising between now and Election Day. That works out to about 30.6K ads so far and another 6.8K still to come,
RBR-TVBR observation: We know this sort of thing is good for business, but we have to say as residents of what has been a battleground state for the past few cycles – this process gets sickening, and quickly.
The same ads over and over and over.
The heavy reliance on negative ads.
The content of those negative ads – so often, a reasonable position on one side or the other of a complex policy debate is distorted until it sounds like the candidate being attacked was drummed out of a recognized hate organization for being too malicious.
We’re sure the people that create these ads know what they are doing, and we probably see what we see because it researches well.
We’re also sure outsiders can be incredibly nastier than politicians themselves, since they don’t have to state their name and stand behind their message.
If politicians and their media people believe that winning is so important that they are happy to sicken all of us on the process and chip away even further at America’s ever-more deep-seated mistrust of our representatives in Congress, it’s just a sad state of affairs.
