Does negative campaigning help or hurt?

Does negative campaigning help or hurt?


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Randall Jeppesen reporting The results are starting to come in from Florida, where the race between Republicans is getting both very close and very ugly. But how much do negative ads affect voter decisions?

Mitt Romney and John McCain pulled out all the stops in their attacks against each other today. From phone calls to top 10 lists, does the negative campaign strategy work?

"Candidates use negative campaigns because they do work, they have an effect. What we worry about in the long run is that it will turn people off to politics," explained BYU political science professor Chris Karpowitz.

Karpowitz says negative campaigning can also give a candidate a bad reputation among his or her party. However, with what looks like record voter turnout in Florida, so far the negative ads haven't kept people from voting there.

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