Is there a threshhold to the number of negative attacks that can be made..

[kentuck]

..on a political candidate and still be effective? And on John Kerry in specific? Before it backfires or has a diminishing return for the attacker? What determines the threshhold, if there is such a thing? Or can negative attacks work forever - as long as they are run - but it depends on the subtlety and ingenuity of the attacks?

Will the Bush campaign be able to run another attack ad similar to the Swift Boats ad and get the same result? Or will they be able to continue running the Swift Boat ads until election day? Any thoughts on this subject?

[ayeshahaqqiqa]

1. what I'm hearing is

that folks in my neck of the woods are ignoring all ads and attacks. They seem to have already made up their minds one way or another...and most folks I talk to are voting Kerry, mainly because they know what Bush has done and they don't like it.

[lolly]

2. Precedent in Clinton attacks

Don't have a ready answer, but it is telling that eventually Clinton's numbers started going up with each ridiculous "scandal" brought up against him, in both the elections and with the impeachment fiasco.

So, yes, if the candidate responds well ( and what that means can be debated) the voters do eventually get weary of increasingly vicious smears.

[KittyWampus]

3. Great Question! This Is One I'd Love To Hear From Dem Strategist

because there HAVE to be numbers available.

The Swiftliars were none to subtle... that's for sure.

[OHswingvoter]

4. people start tuning it out.

like when I was a kid, my mom used to gripe at me all the time--I barely paid any attention to her and it never affected my behavior. The problem is people start tuning out and then they don't bother to turn out and vote. There is a method to this madness. they want to depress voter turnout.

[Julien Sorel]

5. The only thing the experts seem to agree on on this topic

is that negative campaigning supresses voter turnout. I've been doing some lazy research on this the past few days on the web, and people who are pretty sharp have different opinions on just how negative a campaign can get and not suffer backlashes. Some people think you can never go too negative.

It would be nice if we had some empirical data to work with, but one of the problems with gathering such data is that a lot of negative campaigning goes on on the sly, for example, the whisper campaigns against McCain in 2000. How do you quantify the amount of effort that went into that, compared to Bush's overall ad spending? Without information like that, it's kind of hard to say just how negative a campaign is.

One thing that seems obvious to me is that a negative campaign that is all over the board -- attacking Bush for Iraq, the economy, dropping his dog, looking stupid, and the fact that Pickles looks like she hasn't been "touched" in quite some time, for example, risks defusing your message, and having people tune you out, or at least tuning out the less relevant parts of your message. With more important issues going on the plate, the whole Swift Hoax should end up being pushed off, in the voters' minds, if not the airwaves. But the way the media have behaved over this, you never know.

[Sparkly]

7. I agree about focused vs. all-over attacks

What the GOP does, time after time, is attack over a range of "gotchas" to build one thematically-unified pile of crap, as if they were building a "case." They decide the script (Clinton's immoral, Gore's a liar) and then they find lots and lots of examples, which become difficult to refute as the list grows longer, because it leaves Democrats playing defense against so many stupid things.

But this time, potentially, they've gone over the line. In smearing Kerry's service, they're smearing the US Navy and many, many veterans along with him.

[Doctor_J]

6. I think that the GOP has shown "no"

they will keep making up shit to throw. Every day that goes by in the world is more proof that * is a miserable failure, so they really have no choice. I think they will continue to be effective, too. The fact that anyone watches Faux News is a tribute to the ignorance of the average American right now.

[kentuck]

8. So what would be a creative way to counter these attacks ??

If you respond back to each attack, you would assumed to be on the defensive. That doesn't seem like the best place to fight the battle. :)