Poll: How Do You React to Negative Campaign Ads?

At least $40,000 -- and likely much more -- has been spent on negative campaigning against Eastside candidates, leading to official complaints and protests in downtown Bellevue.

has been spent in the Bellevue City Council race against council hopeful John Stokes and incumbent Claudia Balducci, all of it backed by a group that is funded by the Eastside Leadership Committee, a group mainly funded by Eastside developers Robert Wallace and George Rowley and a company owned by Bellevue Collection developer Kemper Freeman.

In the county council race, while neither King County Council incumbent Jane Hague nor her challenger, Richard Mitchell, have any official negative campaign accounting listed by the Washington State Public Disclosure Commission, both have lobbied official and unofficial complaints at each other regarding attack ads.

that made it appear that initiative author Tim Eyman encouraged Republicans to sit out the Hague-Mitchell race. Mitchell countered with a PDC complaint, saying that expenditures for an ad that attacked his record as an attorney was not reported to the PDC in a timely manner.

Mitchell's campaign tactics cost him an endorsement from the Seattle Times, which switched its endorsement to Jane Hague in the general election after supporting Richard Mitchell in the primary because his ads "were nasty to the point of being offensive."

Over the weekend, I received one of the negative campaign mailers against a candidate. That inspired this week's question:

How do you react to negative campaign ads?