[jfengel]

And indeed, it's not clear to me how much of a difference those ads made against the background of that total advertising budget. Such things are hard to measure, but at the very least those ads came after decades of campaigning that primed people to believe them.

Personally, I suspect they moved the needle by at most a point or two. Given the closeness of the election, that was all they needed -- indeed, they may not have been needed at all. But they do make a very good focal point for the broader question of whether it was worth it to win elections under those circumstances, with their opponents presented in such negative terms that political cooperation is almost impossible and they can achieve almost nothing legislatively.