Preface - I'm not making a political thread, per se. I'm just talking about when candidates smear each other and wonder how it affects you. Totally non-partisan and not US-centric either because I'm sure that wherever in the world there are elections someone is trash talking someone else.

Here's how they affect me...

Whenever I see a smear ad I put a negative mark in my mental tally colum of the candidate who owns the ad. I don't care about how false or factual the ad is.

Maybe I'm just contrarian.

A couple years ago there was a heated race in my state. One candidate focused on the good he could do. The other candidate focused on the bad that the other candidate had done in prior offices - his whole campaign was built around it. Guess who I voted for?
I even had a letter to the editor in the paper printed on the subject (my first time in print! :D ).

But it seems that the if politicians' committees spend so much time on negative ads then they think people are listening.
Am I in the minority?

(fellow mods - feel free to move this to the controversial forum if you think you should, but I don't think it really is because it's meant to be non partisan)

Yea, the problem with it is that the smear tactics work. They spend a lot of money determining relevant likes/dislikes, and marketing towards them. Sometimes there may be some cognitive dissonance (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_dissonance) going on. Or, likened to having three equally qualified candidates for a job (that you like), you have to find something you don't like about two of them.

Smear tactics is nothing new, and sadly, will probably be around for a long time.

Sometimes it affects me. I'm a Party Man, so my only decisions come in the Primary. Even then, I generally know who I want based on character issues.

Political smear campaigns target less informed voters, which unfortunately is the large majority. If I were to base my decisions as a voter on things such as a tv commercial, roadside billboard, or streetside sign, I would be ashamed to enter the voting poll. You always see campaigns targeting young people, to get them to vote, better voter turnout is always wanted...i've always thought these campaigns were a waste of time, we'd be better served if that money was used to educate voters on where they can acquire factual information on the candidates and make decisions that involve a broader thought process than "he has shifty eyes" or "the commercial told me he had poor attendance in congress".

Smear tactics, however distasteful, often work if you're trying to get the uneducated vote, so you will always see them in some form or another. The whole system is a mess, and controversial.

That's one reason you'll never see ol' Randy do anything in the political arena (I was asked to run for School Board and the County Quorum Court once). I could never counter the "smear".

I think I have posted about this before, but IMHO it is relevant here, so here goes...

There is a technique called the push poll that I suspect will be used widely, considering the tone that the primaries are taking. You get a phone call, and the caller says they work for some company you likely have never heard of, and they are taking a poll. The questions start out innocently enough, but degenerate into something like "...Would you vote for Mr. X, when you know he kicks puppies, cheats on his wife, and voted to send aid to Osama Bin Laden?" That's only a slight exaggeration. The idea is to get you to not vote for X.