Negative campaigning has a long and (dis)honorable history in our country.
As far back as 1828, John Quincy Adams was railing against his opponent Andrew Jackson, labelling Jackson's mother a prostitute and his wife an adulterer. In 1964, LBJ aired the now-infamous "Daisy" commercial, which suggested that a win for Barry Goldwater would propel the country into nuclear war.
No, this year's crop of political hopefuls did not invent the art of mud-slinging, but they certainly engaged in it to a terrifying degree, mustering all the venom and playing into the same fears that drove Donald Trump into office in 2016.
Matters got particularly ugly in Edison, where some bozo distributed anonymous fliers emblazoned with the words "Make Edison Great Again" and bearing pictures of two school board candidates - one Chinese-American and the other Indian-American - with the word "Deport" scrawled under their images.
Not far away in Hoboken, fliers pictured a turban-wearing Ravi Bhalla, a Sikh running for mayor, and urged voters: "Don't let Terrorism take over our town!"
On the statewide level, gubernatorial candidate Kim Guadagno went all-Trump on us with a political ad falsely accusing Phil Murphy of "having the back" of a convicted killer and undocumented worker.
The ad continued to run despite protests by Latinos, legislators and union leaders that its message, designed to stir up primitive emotions among voters, was racially insensitive at best, an instance of fear-mongering at worst.
At least one veteran political observer knows where the blame lies.
"I certainly have not seen fliers this explicitly racist in the past, and I do think it's an outgrowth of the 2016 campaign and the language and policies being advanced by the administration," says Scott Novakowski, associate counsel for the New Jersey Institute for Social Justice.
Novakowski worries that the current climate is "normalizing" racism, making it all the more essential to push back.
All of this has resonance in New Jersey, which likes to pat itself on the back for being one of the most ethnically diverse states in the union.
The Middlesex County Prosecutor's Office is investigating the Edison fliers, trying to determine whether a chargeable bias crime or other crime was committed by their being circulated anonymously. The state's Division of Elections has also been called in; a spokeswoman said the "appropriate authorities" are reviewing the materials.
Perhaps the most promising thing to come out of this hate-filled campaign season is that although desperate candidates often turn to negative ads as a last resort, what happened Tuesday suggests that voters aren't always buying the scare tactics the ads are peddling.
They didn't in Edison and Hoboken, where victory went to Bhalla, Jerry Shi and Falguni Patel, and they didn't when it came time to choose their new governor, either.
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