One of the most important and widely used strategies in political campaigns is negative publicity: using the media to emphasize an opponent's flaws, instead of focusing on one's own campaign and personal attributes to gain an advantage. Research suggests that the use of negative advertising in political campaigns is typical in all places where individual ideas and policies have the capacity to be contested; therefore they are more common in democracies (Merritt 1984). This makes negative publicity an integral part of the political campaign process and, in turn, an essential component of voter turnout. While it was commonly thought that the mass media had little or no effect on politics and election campaigns, the introduction of advertising through television replaced this ideology (Lau 1999). Having constant access to campaign information, as well as positive and negative portrayals of candidates, allows citizens to make more informed decisions when voting. The challenge; however, it is brought forward with empirical evidence that contrasts with the current state of knowledge on whether negative political advertising has a mobilizing, demobilizing, or no effect on voter turnout as a whole. Empirically, evidence shows that negative political advertising has minimal effects on voter turnout. However, this can be attributed to the individual-level data, survey data, and field experiments used in some studies, which skew the results so that they undoubtedly indicate no effect. After careful examination, a literature review shows that most studies find that negative political advertising has a demobilizing effect on voter turnout. In contrast, some studies, including those by famed political scientist Joh...... middle of paper ......advertise through the conservative political advocacy group, Americans for Prosperity, to send messages such as "it will be as if The County of Iron is occupied by radical environmentalists” and “call these anti-mining radicals and tell them to stand up for you and your local jobs, not radical environmental policies” to negatively attack county council candidates who support removal of the operation mining in Iron County. While the Koch brothers believed this negative publicity would increase the number of voters for their Republican candidate, the campaign strategy backfired and favored the Democratic candidate. The citizens of Polk and Iron County were so outraged that out-of-state billionaires had the audacity to get involved and try to strategically influence local politics, who all rallied together to vote for the Democratic candidate who, in turn, won the election..