Negative Advertising, Negative Commercials, Attack Ads Quotes

With this new stupid Supreme Court ruling, secret money can come in on an unlimited level from corporations. Nobody knows where it comes from. That distorts the political situation in our country tremendously. Most of that money is spent on negative advertising that is tearing down the character and reputation of your opponent, and it works, although most American people say, "We don't like negative advertising," it works.

Get your facts first, and then you can distort them as much as you please.

I've never, in my whole 30 years in office, run a negative ad.

I'm not the inventor of negative campaigning, but I'm an ardent practitioner.

Mudslinging – In politics, anything bad the opponent says about our candidate; in contrast, when our candidate does this, it is called 'making a good point.

With all their attack ads, the President is just throwing away money...and he's pretty experienced at that.

Candidates who went into an election with negatives higher than 30 or 40 points just inevitably lost.... Drive up the opposition's negatives.

I understand that Donald's [Trump] been strongly supported by the NRA. The gun lobby's on his side. They're running millions of dollars of ads against me.

Certainly we're going to continue to see those commercials that I call 30-second drive-by shootings. And they're going to have a lot of money to do it. But we're going to combat it.

People do not like negative campaigns.

Super Tuesday is the day on which most states hold their primaries. Its darker partner is Dirty Tricks Thursday: the Thursday before an election when candidates release scandalous stories to garner bad publicity for their opponent: the timing means the accused will have little time to refute the allegations.

It wouldn’t hurt to remind the voters of what scoundrels your opponents are and to smear them at every opportunity….

[In a political contest,] the first guy who defines the other, wins

In a national campaign you are driven to negativism.

Nobody likes, you know, the ugly parts of politics.

I think what people are really crying out for is simple information they can trust when they're bombarded by attack ads, fundraising pitchers and all sort of comment and opinion all over the place increasingly.

Every time a candidate came up from the base, that is with popular support, the Republican establishment went into high gear to destroy them with massive propaganda attack ads and so on. It was one after another, each one crazier than the last.

Unfortunately, every American citizen takes the same position... that we don’t like negative advertisements. But they work! And, as you see, many a candidate has prevailed by tearing down the reputation of an opponent in a more advantageous position.

President Obama has been attacking relentlessly. In 2008 he said that if you're out of fresh ideas you use stale tactics against your opponent - you try and make your opponent unacceptable and that's what he is trying to do.

New developments in negative advertising like Swift Boat Veterans for Truth allow a campaign to hurl invective while shielding the candidate from any association with such strategies.

Despite all the public hand-wringing about negative advertising, political veterans will tell you that it persists because, more often than not, it works. But tearing down the other guy has another attraction: It can be a substitute for building much of a case for what the mudslinger will do once in office.

Even though voters overwhelmingly dislike negative ads, they do influence voters' opinions about a candidate.

You can't let a candidate run for too long. He will be dragged along, cut apart, put back together and ripped to shreds again - from both the political opponents and the media.

I see it all the time in politics. If a candidate gets caught in a lie, he quickly tries to change the subject by throwing more mud at his opponent. The mud keeps flying until some of the slanderous material sticks.

Advertising is only evil when it advertises evil things.