Are these the worst US midterm attack ads of all time?

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American politics is always a full-blooded affair, and the midterms have stayed true to form. The Democrats are gunning to wrest control of Congress away from the Republicans and President Donald Trump, and many polls suggest they have a shot.

Both parties are spending big, and these elections, which happen every four years, are on track to be America’s most expensive. Beyond the free flow of dollars, analytics firm AdImpact has pegged political advertising spending for this election at $US11.2 billion ($16 billion). This year’s ads have also been particularly venomous, even by US standards, with increasingly sophisticated AI technology enabling ever-more insidious angles of attack.

The one attack advertisement that had everyone talking wasn’t even about a Senate race. Instead, the fight for the governor’s seat in Ohio took a savage turn when Republican candidate Vivek Ramaswamy released an ad featuring his Democratic rival Amy Acton’s estranged mother.

In the minute-long ad, Acton’s mother Donna Arthur labels her daughter a liar, claiming that she had made up the accounts of her traumatic childhood.

“I love my daughter, but when I saw her lying about her opponent – and it’s not easy for a mother to say this – but Amy has a serious problem,” Arthur said in the ad.

“She is a liar. She lies about her past. She says she grew up living in a tent. None of that is true. She’s lied her entire life.

“Don’t vote for people who lie. Don’t let her become your governor.”

However, the ad failed to mention Acton’s strained relationship with her mother, along with court and police records that confirm Acton’s harrowing past, and her leaving home to escape alleged childhood abuse by her stepfather.

While Donald Trump said he had no problem with the attack, it was widely criticised by many Republicans who condemned it for being in bad taste and crossing a moral red line.

Ramaswamy originally defended his ad, but its run was ended early after the heavy backlash.

The Wolverine state’s Senate race has turned into a brawl among local Democrats, with the lead-up to the election dominated by Democratic congresswoman Haley Stevens’s defection, as she endorsed Republican candidate Mike Rogers over Democratic candidate Abdul El-Sayed.

Stevens lost the party’s Senate primary to El-Sayed, and relations between the two had reportedly been strained for some time. But the final straw apparently came with the controversial “Israel ad” produced by a left-wing group, Rebellion PAC, supporting El-Sayed.

The ad, set inside a grocery store, shows a couple shopping and discussing what to buy. The woman tells her partner to “put those eggs back” because “we have to set that $7 aside for killing Palestinians”.

At the end, a narrator tells viewers that El-Sayed’s Republican opponent, former representative Mike Rogers, “only cares about what Israelis want and so little about what you want” while El-Sayed is “for you”.

Posting on X last week, Stevens described the ad as “fearmongering about Israel” and “not a winning strategy for any state”, while critics slammed it for playing up antisemitic tropes. Jewish advocacy group the Anti-Defamation League said the ad propagated “the myth that Jews are to blame for society’s problems”.

El-Sayed completely distanced himself, saying he didn’t agree with the ad’s message and that his campaign had nothing to do with it.

The backlash from Stevens and her subsequent support for Republican candidate Rogers have embarrassed the Democrats ahead of a must-win race.

But despite the drama, an election-day New York Times/Siena poll gave El-Sayed an 11-point lead over Rogers.

Sharing AI-generated content on Truth Social has been a favourite pastime of Trump during his second term in office.

The president has repeatedly shared controversial material, most notoriously a video depicting Barack and Michelle Obama as apes and, last month, a clip showing himself wrestling a tiger which killed a man who entered its enclosure at a British wildlife park.

So it’s no surprise that AI-powered attack ads have featured heavily ahead of polling day.

Concerns about deepfakes and misinformation muddying the waters for voters have prompted dozens of states to pass laws that require more transparency in the use of AI in political advertising.

But that hasn’t stopped both parties from using the technology to craft venomous digital attacks.

One such fake clip this week showed New York Mayor Zoran Mamdani and state Governor Kathy Hochul walking hand in hand through a sunlit city park, discussing a so-called “political delusion pill” to help voters overcome fears about crime and the cost of living. The ad was the work of the campaign of Bruce Blakeman, the Republican candidate for New York governor.

Another candidate facing an AI-enabled onslaught is James Talarico, the Democratic Senate candidate in Texas.

Locked in a neck-and-neck race against Republican Ken Paxton, Talarico came under fire in a September ad, King James, that featured his AI avatar rewriting the Bible with a crayon, with quotes overlaid from his previous speeches suggesting “God was nonbinary” and “not a Christian”.

Talarico, a Presbyterian seminarian, tried to respond in the best way he could, clapping back at Paxton with an ad of his own stressing it was made by “humans, not AI”.

In a contender for one of the most bizarre and intense campaign ads ever, independent Nebraska candidate Dan Osborn threw an election-eve haymaker at his Republican opponent, Pete Ricketts.

The satirical clip, posted as if from Ricketts himself, portrays him as secretly aligned with Democrats, in thrall to big corporations, and donors linked to Jeffrey Epstein. To complicate things, while Osborn has said he will not formally vote with either major party if elected, the Democrats aren’t contesting the Nebraska Senate seat in play, and the state party has endorsed him.

According to The New York Times, many Democrats back Osborn, believing an independent has a better chance of flipping a Republican seat than a Democrat in a state where both parties’ brands appear to have become toxic.

But the Times also said a poll in Nebraska found that most voters in fact appear to view Osborn as a Democrat in disguise. Perhaps, then, a curious case of political “projection”?

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