RALEIGH, N.C. – A legislative proposal to stop requiring newspaper notices for public hearings was shelved after opposition from North Carolina publishers.

Rep. Paul Stam of Wake County said Thursday he would stop trying to pass his statewide bill and allow about a dozen communities to experiment with Internet-based notices. A House judiciary committee takes up the local bill on Monday.
 
Stam’s proposal would have allowed local governments to stop paying for newspaper advertisements announcing public hearings. Stam said governments would save money by posting the notices on their own Web sites or sending e-mail alerts.

Newspaper publishers countered that many find out about upcoming government action by happening onto the ads as they flip through their paper.

RALEIGH, N.C.  – The State Employees Association of North Carolina is going after two House Democrats for their support of bills unpopular to group members.

The association announced Monday it will run radio commercials in the districts of House Majority Leader Hugh Holliman of Davidson County and Rep. Margaret Dickson of Cumberland County starting Tuesday.

Holliman pushed a bill signed into law by Gov. Beverly Perdue last week that will raise expenses for the health insurance plan for state employees, retirees and their dependents. The ad says Holliman’s priorities are wrong and that maybe it’s time for new leadership.

Dickson is cited for sponsoring a bill that would lay out rules on how state government could lay off workers as a last resort to balance the budget.

North Carolina residents believe there has been more mudslinging and negative campaigning this election season than in previous years, although most say political ads have not been helpful in selecting a candidate to endorse, according to the latest Elon University Poll. 
 
Fifty-nine percent of North Carolinians say this election has been more negative than past contests and 90 percent report having seen negative ads. Despite this, 64 percent of residents who viewed negative television ads say those ads were “not at all effective” in influencing which candidate to support.
 
“Thrust into the national spotlight with very competitive elections, the state has seen its airwaves flooded with campaign advertisements,” said Hunter Bacot, director of the Elon University Poll. “But North Carolinians don’t believe everything they see and hear.”
 
Residents said the Republican Party has been more negative in the race for the White House with 25 percent identifying the McCain-Palin campaign as “too negative or nasty” compared with 8 percent for the Obama-Biden ticket.  Sixty-nine percent of residents feel the overall tone of political ads in North Carolina have been negative.
 
Negative impressions of three major contests are indicated below:

Presidential: McCain/Palin (50 percent), Obama/Biden (30 percent)
Senatorial: Elizabeth Dole (48 percent), Kay Hagan (38 percent)
Gubernatorial: Pat McCrory (21 percent), Bev Perdue (30 percent)
 
Seventy-nine percent of residents feel they received enough information to make an informed vote this year. The outlets where people reported gaining most of their election information were as follows (respondents could provide more than one answer):
 
Local television news: 53 percent
Local newspapers: 38 percent
Internet: 37 percent
Cable television news: 36 percent
National network television news: 29 percent

WASHINGTON – After weeks of being out-advertised by Barack Obama, John McCain and the Republican Party are nearly matching the Democrat ad for ad in key battleground markets.

That includes North Carolina.

Ad spending and ad placement data obtained from Democratic and Republican operatives show that in the closing days of the campaign the Republican voice has grown louder in some states such as Florida, Ohio, North Carolina, Virginia and Pennsylvania.

North Carolina also is among the states being targeted by the Republican National Committee.
  
A new poll released this week shows Obama and McCain running about even among North Carolina voters. The state hasn’t voted for a Democratic presidential candidate since Jimmy Carter won in 1976.

Politico asked campaign operatives on both sides to nominate their favorite commercials of the cycle — and by favorite, we mean the most memorably bad.

CHARLOTTE – Outside groups from environmentalists to gun owners have poured more than $20 million into N.C. campaigns, a record level of spending fueling a surge of attack ads in the state’s top races.

RALEIGH, N.C.- Democratic candidate for governor Beverly Perdue is being criticized in a new Republican television ad by her Democratic primary rival.

The Republican Governors Association unveiled Wednesday a TV commercial with footage from a debate between Perdue and State Treasurer Richard Moore.

Moore calls Perdue “someone who has led the go-along get-along club in Raleigh for 20 years.” Moore endorsed Perdue after the May primary.

The Perdue campaign also has a new ad suggesting GOP nominee Pat McCrory is “not for all of us” and would divide urban and rural interests if elected.

The GOP ad tries to link Perdue with former Democratic House Speaker Jim Black, who is in federal prison on a corruption conviction. The two were in the Legislature together. Perdue has never been accused of crimes.

WASHINGTON – If John McCain and Barack Obama think their ads blasting each other are persuading undecided voters, they’re probably wrong. But negative ads do have an impact, an AP-Knowledge Networks poll suggests, even if it’s just to neutralize the other guy’s attacks.

They can also solidify support – or simply turn voters off to both candidates.

In a new survey, voters were asked to watch two of the presidential candidates’ negative ads, an Obama spot that says McCain would tax health benefits and a McCain ad that claims Obama wants “massive government.” The campaigns have spent millions of dollars on such ads with millions more committed for the last two weeks before Election Day.

On the whole, adwatchers who went into the experiment undecided were unmoved. About 60 percent of so-called “persuadable” voters said the ads made them no more or less likely to vote for McCain or Obama. And about a third appeared to throw up their hands, saying they were less likely to vote for either candidate after watching the ads.

Are this year’s ads fair?

More than half the voters polled believe presidential campaign commercials have been unfair or somewhat unfair. And the more ads they said they had watched, the less fair they found them. People who had seen 10 or fewer ads mostly thought they were fair, 62 percent. But people who had seen 30 or more in the past week said the opposite – 63 percent said most of the ads were unfair.
 
People who had seen ads by both candidates tended to think Obama’s ads were more fair than McCain’s, 39 percent to 16 percent. That may have helped Obama neutralize McCain’s critical ads.

Among partisans, 39 percent of strong Obama supporters said the ads made them more likely to vote for him, while 29 percent of McCain’s strong supporters said the same for him.

As for poll respondents’ views about what they see on TV, about four of 10 said Obama’s ads mostly attack, while about seven of 10 said that of McCain’s.

A study by the Wisconsin Advertising Project at the University of Wisconsin found that at the beginning of October McCain’s ads were almost all negative, whereas only 34 percent of Obama’s ads were. But the ratio has been much closer though the campaign, with seven of 10 McCain ads and six of 10 Obama ads criticizing opponents. McCain is beginning to mix his ads, much as Obama has, into a blend of positive and negative.
 
The Associated Press-Knowledge Networks poll was conducted Oct. 10-12, a time when McCain was drawing particular attention for questioning Obama’s relationship with 1960’s militant William Ayers.

“It’s not just McCain’s negative ads, it’s also the news media’s coverage,” said John Geer, a political scientist at Vanderbilt University and author of “In Defense of Negativity: Attack Ads in Presidential Campaigns.” “The news media have given McCain a bit of a hard time for running negative ads, and I think that’s also shaping the public’s perception.”

The two ads viewed by poll respondents aimed to cast the rival candidate in a negative light.

The McCain ad argues Obama and “his liberal congressional allies” will produce “painful income taxes.” Obama’s ad strikes at McCain’s health care plan, saying it would tax workers for their employer-provided health coverage. In fact, Obama would raise personal income taxes only on families making over $250,000 and individuals making more than $200,000. And McCain’s health care plan offers a tax credit that would be more generous for the vast majority of people than the current tax break on benefits.

Researchers who study political advertising say there is no empirical evidence negative ads alone drive voters away.

“Very many negative ads are perfectly accurate and perfectly factual and perfectly relevant. And they don’t always work,” said Ken Goldstein, a professor at the University of Wisconsin and director of the Wisconsin Advertising Project.

The AP-Knowledge Networks poll of 1,287 registered voters has an overall margin of sampling error of plus or minus 2.8 percentage points. It was conducted over the Internet by Knowledge Networks, which initially contacted people using traditional telephone polling methods and followed with online interviews. People chosen for the study who had no Internet access were given it for free.

WASHINGTON – A campaign finance watchdog group on Friday filed a complaint with federal regulators against two groups – one pro-Republican and the other pro-Democrat – alleging they violated the law by airing political ads during the presidential contest.

Democracy 21 wants the Federal Election Commission to investigate the American Issues Project, which ran a $2.8 million ad campaign against Democratic presidential nominee Barack Obama, and the American Leadership Project, a group that backed Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton in the Democratic primaries and ran about $4.3 million in ads supporting her or against Obama.

The complaint argues that both groups violated the law by not operating as a political action committee, which would have restricted their fundraising to capped donations. The American Leadership Project was largely financed by unions that supported Clinton. The American Issues Project ad against Obama was paid for by Texas billionaire Harold Simmons, a McCain fundraiser.

“The FEC complaint we filed today is intended to help ensure that the FEC continues to take enforcement action against any illegal activities by outside spending groups that may occur in the 2008 election,” said Fred Wertheimer, the president of Democracy 21.

The American Issues Project is a nonprofit 501(c)4 organization. It ran ads in August in Michigan and Ohio linking Obama to William Ayers, a Vietnam-era militant who helped found the violent Weather Underground. Ayers, now a university professor in Chicago, has worked on charity and education projects with Obama and hosted a political meet-and-greet for Obama in the 1990s.

As a 501(c)4 organization, the group must have as its main purpose a mission other than seeking to influence elections. Wertheimer also wrote to the Internal Revenue Service asking the IRS to examine whether the group violated its nonprofit status.

In a statement, American Issues Project President Ed Martin said the group complies with the law because most of its activities are nonpolitical. “This is a totally spurious complaint – we are well aware of the requirements of the law and are in complete compliance with those requirements,” he said.

The American Leadership Project was created as a 527 group, named after the section of the tax code that governs them. Its main contributors were the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees and the American Federation of Teachers. The group also ran a radio ad against McCain in Colorado against McCain during he Democratic National Convention.
  
The group did not have an immediate response.