Wednesday night Chris Abele and Chris Larson will face off in a televised debate in their race for county executive, a race that is tighter than most people expected.

One of the things that will almost assuredly be discussed is the current Chris Abele commercial running heavily on local television. According to FCC records, the Abele campaign spent $71,667 to run this TV commercial on four Milwaukee stations, the Journal Sentinel reported.

The ad is the very definition of negative advertising. In it the Abele campaign uses the following phrases to describe Larson:

• "in bed with special interests"
• "gobbled up money from big banks that caused the foreclosure crisis"
• "gave huge tax breaks to high interest charging credit card companies costing taxpayers millions of dollars every year"

While none of the claims is not ultimately true, this is clearly misleading advertising.

Abele has been a generous philanthropist in Milwaukee and an effective county executive, even though his constant battles with the county board have been a distraction. It's disconcerting to see his campaign stoop to this kind of approach.

Abele's campaign ran a ton of ads during the primary, all of them positive about his work as county executive. In one he was walking down a sun-dappled street with three women, talking about his achievements and how dedicated he was to his job.

But he lost to Larson by about 750 votes in the primary and the sunny Abele ads were replaced by the accusatory and negative ads. There is little scholarly evidence that negative ads work better than positive, but campaign consultants, by and large, think that they do, thus we get the avalanche of negativity in campaigns.

Here is some of the research that the campaign is using to legitimize this spot:

• The claim that Larson is "in bed with special interests" is based on the fact that Larson was quoted in a 2008 Milwaukee Journal Sentinel article, when he was running for county supervisor, as saying that the "parks, budget are the top issues" in the campaign. Abele’s people apparently define the support for the park system as a special interest.
• The assertion that Larson "gobbled up money from big banks that caused the foreclosure crisis" is based on a couple of small contributions, one of which is blatantly absurd.
• The Abele campaign document cites a $1,000 contribution from JP Morgan Chase to the Friends of Chris Larson committee in 2014. That may well be a legitimate contribution to cite, but then they list 10 contributions totaling $1,300, dating back five years, from Kevin Flaherty, who is identified as vice president/relationship manager of Associated Bank. Flaherty is a prominent Milwaukee gay rights activist and is very active in the LGBTQ community.
• The fact that he works for Associated Bank has no relevance to what is clearly identified in the campaign finance reports as an "individual" contribution. This would be like a woman who is a clerk at Pick ‘n Save donating $10 to the Bernie Sanders campaign and, because she was required to list her employer, the Hillary Clinton campaign announcing that Pick ‘n Save endorsed Sanders.

"I’m not going to give you a yes or no answer to that," said Abele’s campaign manager, Tia Torhorst, when asked about the misleading nature of that particular claim. "Everything in the ad is true. There is plenty of proof."

The Abele campaign also used a total of $2,835 from the Wisconsin Bankers Association as more proof, even though that donation was made not to Larson, but to the State Senate Democratic Committee, which Larson headed as the senate minority leader. The committee is designed to help Democratic senate election candidates. 

Then there's the claim that Larson "gave huge tax breaks to high interest credit card companies costing taxpayers millions of dollars a year."

This relates to Assembly bill 644 which passed in 2014. It gave private label credit cards, like Kohl’s and Boston Store and other small businesses that have their own credit cards, the right to deduct from their sales tax payments uncollectible and bad debts of customers. It was designed to give the small companies the same benefit enjoyed by companies like Visa and MasterCard.

Abele’s campaign is by no means the only one that has engaged in negative campaigning. A group called The Wisconsin Working Families Party has done direct mail pieces in support of Larson that have tied Abele to Scott Walker and some of his initiatives.

For example, one piece of literature claims that Abele worked with Walker and "pushed for a takeover of public schools."

In fact, Abele never wanted the legislation and argued against it. Once it was passed by Republicans, he promised not to take over any schools.  

The fact that Abele has cooperated sometimes with Walker and Republicans in the legislature is seen by many, including Abele, to be a good and rare thing in politics. Abele’s campaign makes the claim, as he has, that in order to get important things done in Wisconsin this kind of cooperation is necessary.

"We do not cooperate with the Working Families Party on any aspect of the campaign," said Josh Kilroy, campaign manager for Larson, when asked about the piece. "It is 100 percent inaccurate to attribute anything in the WFP materials to the campaign."

It’s always possible to find some minuscule truth somewhere and use it to make a big blanket statement. Larson did, for example, vote for the credit card bill, but the issue was not what was implied in the campaign commercial.