Three of Four Candidates Behind 2026's Nastiest Ads Lost

Three of the four candidates behind the most egregious attack ads of the 2026 midterms lost their races, handing campaigners the clearest signal in years that going low may no longer pay.

ADWEEK reviewed the mudslinging output of the cycle and picked out the four worst offenders last week. The list included Republican Sen. Roger Marshall of Kansas, who claimed his opponent Adam Hamilton "protected" a child molester, and Ohio Republican gubernatorial candidate Vivek Ramaswamy, whose ad featured the mother of his opponent Amy Acton calling her a liar — Acton has said she was sexually abused by her father.

What did the results say?

The scoreboard was unkind to the attackers. Marshall lost. Ramaswamy lost. California Republican gubernatorial candidate Steve Hilton, who ran a spot using AI-generated girls sexually experimenting in a bedroom to urge Democrats to vote Republican, also lost.

Acton told CNN the ad questioning her abuse allegations — delivered through her own mother — "crossed everyone's boundaries." Voters agreed. She won by a 7.9-point margin.

The Hamilton case tests how far an accusation can stretch. A man later convicted of misdemeanor sexual battery did work briefly at a summer camp run by Hamilton, a pastor. Marshall's leap to saying his opponent had "protected a pedophile" was, for the electorate, apparently a step too far.

The pattern carries a caveat: correlation is not causation. Losing candidates may have gone negative because they were already behind, not the reverse. The results do not prove the ads backfired — only that they failed to rescue the campaigns that ran them.

Did any negative ad win?

One did. Democrat Brian Poindexter won Ohio's 7th congressional district with an ad reminding voters that incumbent Republican Max Miller's wife, Emily Moreno, has accused him of domestic abuse. Miller has denied the charges.

Even here, the causation is shaky. NBC affiliate WKYC reported that Poindexter had been winning supporters by touting his blue-collar background as an ironworker well before the abuse allegations gained media traction. The ad may have reinforced a trend rather than created one.

Why did strategists ever believe in going negative?

Because the playbook is old and, until recently, resilient. Democratic political strategist Dane Strother observed that "negative ads and campaigns do work—and have for more than 2,000 years," noting that political slams have been unearthed in Pompeii.

"The day that negative ads no longer are effective," he added, "they no longer will be used."

That day may be closer. The big takeaway from 2026 might actually rest in research published by Cambridge University in 2014, which found that down and dirty ads "have become so popular in practice," even though "there is so little evidence that they work especially well."

For marketers and political operatives alike, the 2026 midterms offer a working test of that thesis: four low blows, three losses, one unproven win. If the pattern holds into 2028, the industry's most durable assumption — that attack advertising moves votes — will face its hardest audit yet.