Buffalo, N.Y. (WBEN) - With one day to go before Election Day, outside dollars are pouring into political action committees and campaigns in the race for Erie County Executive.
Political experts say how the money is used determines how effective the strategy is.
"Smart money is usually late money," said Republican strategist Carl Calabrese.
Calabrese says lots of people aren't thinking about politics until very late. He notices there's usually a pretty good percentage of people who are undecided going into the last week of an election. Getting to undecided voters is why you see a deluge of commercials and mailings.
Calabrese says the key is spending the money smartly.
"You can waste a lot of money in the last week if you don't have the right message here to the right constituents," Calabrese noted.
Calabrese adds if you're talking to people who are already going to vote for you, you're wasting your money. That's where polling comes in.
Shawn Donahue from the University at Buffalo says one thing we haven't seen in the County Executive's race is polling. So he and other analysts are looking at how campaigns are run.
"I think [Mark] Poloncarz has raised a lot more money than [Chrissy] Casilio in the race, but one of the strategies, it seems like for both candidates, has been to try to raise up the negatives of the others through negative attack ads, mailings, and other things," said Donahue with WBEN.
Donahue adds whenever you see a late dump of money, it can sometimes indicate the race may be a lot closer or more competitive than many think. He says late attack ads may not be as effective as in the past.
"We have more liberalized early voting than we used to. So I think it could have less effective people have already voted," Donahue noted.
One other important factor is whether the content gets an opponent's negative rating up or backfires.
A businessman gave $100,000 to a political action committee launching attack ads against Poloncarz, while another businessman launched a campaign against locally heavy gas taxes.
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