Negative Campaigning

The cliche is that everyone says they're against negative campaigning but it works so candidates often feel they have to use it.

Perhaps most importantly, people use the term "negative campaigning" with very different meanings.

If candidate A says candidate B voted for Bill 123 and continues to support the policies of Bill 123, and if you elect candidate A he will opposed Bill 123 and its policies, in my opinion that is not negative campaigning. In fact, it's exactly what we want from candidates so we will know what their differences are and can decide for whom to vote.

However, if a candidate says, for example, that his opponent voted to hurt children but when you look up the bill involved you find that that is not what he voted for, or that the bill is much more complicated than simply helping or hurting children, that is negative campaigning, The same is true of any campaigning that involves an opponent's family or other things that are not relevant to deciding which candidate supports positions that are the same as those of voters.

It's especially bad when the real negative campaigning goes on and on, confusing some voters and making everyone feel they need to take showers after reading or hearing from candidates.

What can be done about this? Sad to say, probably very little.

Probably the only effective way to end the nasty, false and misleading negative campaigning is probably for voters to prove to candidates that it doesn't work by voting for those who don't do it. Another idea is to promote the concept of fact checking, but one of the groups that does this is often wrong in its "corrections" of what candidates say and write so this cannot be relied on too much.

There have been some hotly contested races in MoCo where every candidate ran clean campaigns, but unfortunately we've also seen our share of very dirty and negative campaigns. Hopefully, the voters will become more knowledgeable and consider the type of campaign run by a candidate when decided for whom they will vote.