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Great news!  There will be plenty more political attack ads before the November election.

Wait, wait, don’t run away.  You need to wade into the muck and take some time to understand how these ads work.

There are two ways to scrutinize them. One is to check for accuracy. The new ads should be carefully and publicly scrutinized the way Civil Beat’s Chad Blair has done all through the 2014 campaigns and Dave Shapiro did in last Sunday’s Star-Advertiser.

The second approach requires more muck-wading and less disgust.  Indignation and fact-checking have their limits because, as much research shows, untrue statements often work no matter how much someone points out their inaccuracies.

It’s safe to say that showing that an ad is untrue is just part of, and not necessarily the most important part of, the story.

Hold your nose but open your eyes because the ads’ effectiveness is an important question no matter how slimy or overwrought you think they are.

Suspend your distaste at least for a few minutes so you can consider two other key questions about these ads that have nothing to do with their ethics:

• What exactly are these ads trying to do?

• How is their effectiveness related to a stable fundamental of any big race in Hawaii:  there are significantly more Democratic than Republican voters.

Let’s call that numerical difference between Democrats and Republicans “The Fundamental” because it is stable and longstanding and because it is the starting point in any partisan Hawaii election.

The Fundamental drives the attack ads.  Because of The Fundamental, Republicans and Democrats in Hawaii use these ads in different ways.

To see how this works, let’s consider two attack ads in the present governor’s race.  One is the anti-Ige Health Connector 30-second TV spot paid for by the Republican Governors Association.  The other is the Democratic Governors Association’s TV attack ad about Duke Aiona’s stance on abortion.

The Health Connector ad stresses that Hawaii’s attempt to implement the Affordable Health Care Act was a disaster and that Ige had a hand in this failure.   The ad is part of a series that attack Ige’s competence and stress his close ties to Abercrombie.

Linking your opponent to an unpopular person and an unpopular policy, pretty straightforward and right out of the attack ad playbook.

The ad’s links to The Fundamental are more subtle.

The ad does not mention the word “Republican” at all because that party label is not a positive cue for a sizable majority of Hawaii’s voters.  So the ad is not about keeping Republicans in the fold.  It’s about getting others to break their usual voting habits, including a significant number of voters who call themselves independents but tend to vote Democratic — “leaners” the pollsters call them.

That’s why the ad is not about party or ideology at all.  It’s all about competence.  People whose party identification is less firm are more likely to swayed by competence issues than by any claim to what a distinctly minority party stands for.

The ad is based on the assumption that because the Republican base is so small, it’s not possible to win by stressing party label and ideology.  It is consistent with the way Aiona treats his Republicanism in the campaign as a whole: Party?  Let’s talk about something else.

The anti-Aiona abortion attack ad on the surface is about his position on abortion, but overall it is all about Duke being a Republican — “Republican Aiona,” as the ad calls him. An ominous voice — attack ads are big on ominous voices — says that Aiona may seem to be a reasonable, regular guy, but don’t be deceived. The real Aiona is a Republican who supports the national Republican socially conservative agenda.

In contrast to the anti-Ige ad, this one is all about party identification even though it does not mention the word “Democrat.” The thrust is to remember your true colors and how different they are from Aiona’s. The anti-Aiona ad is a variation of a standard attack ad theme — he’s not one of us.

Because of The Fundamental, that ad has created a dilemma for a Republican candidate like Aiona in a historically Democratic state.  If he chose to respond by trying to counter the ad’s message, he risked keeping the issue alive.  If he failed to respond, he risked letting the ad define him as just another socially conservative war-against-women Republican beholden to the religious right.

There is nothing out of the ordinary about having to make a decision whether to answer or ignore an opponent’s charges.  The research on negative ads indicates, not very helpfully, that sometimes responding to an attack ad works and sometimes ignoring it is the better option.

But Hawaii Republicans’ precarious situation makes the dilemma especially gnarly.

Republicans Need to Overcome a Big Disadvantage

Members of socially conservative Christian churches, who are quite likely to be anti-abortion, are quite likely to vote for Aiona.  But there are not enough of them to make a bigger dent in the Democratic vote.

The tiny increase in the number of 2014 registered voters indicates that the Republican attempt to mobilize more social conservatives has come up short.

As a result, Aiona faces the same old and serious Republican problem.  He needs to dig deeply into the pool of voters who regularly vote Democratic, but responding to the ad by denying that it is true keeps the abortion and he’s-not-one-of-us issues alive.

Aiona has tried to walk the fine line that this dilemma has created. He has publicly countered the ad by saying that it mischaracterizes his position on abortion.  As Aiona describes his position, he is personally against abortion but has no plans to try to change abortion policy.

That is not a position likely to make anti-abortion people happy, nor is his attempt to back away from other hot button issues important to them like same sex marriage.

At the same time, as Civil Beat’s Blair and the Star-Advertiser’s Derrick DePledge have reported, Aiona has recently spent much time assuring people in the socially conservative faith community that he is one of them.

It’s not really clear whether he has increased his campaign time with social conservatives or whether the media has devoted more time to reporting on them.

In any case, the abortion issue has become more visible, and this visibility might very well work in favor of the Democrats just as the ad wanted it to.

Think of it this way from the Democratic perspective: Maybe bringing religion into the campaign will pick up a few voters, but most voters who find that message appealing have already committed to Aiona.  We will give them those few in exchange for keeping our many.

Emotions Play Heavily Into Votes

The Fundamental is at the heart of these ads.  Nick Baldick, an influential political consultant who has worked for many Democratic campaigns around the country, says that voters make their choices on the basis of their hate and fear.

Maybe that is a little too crude and cynical.  Political consultants like to talk tough.  It gets them more work.  Still, his view helps us see the essence of attack ads.

In Hawaii the Democrats use hate and fear to maintain their advantage in party identification by saying that the opposing candidate is not one of us.

The Republicans use hate and fear to overcome this Democratic advantage by saying the opponent will do disastrously incompetent things just as the past extraordinarily unpopular governor did.

There is a lot more to political campaigns than that.  Ads alone are just a small part of the mix.  Successful campaigns, from Barack Obama’s presidential races to Pacific Resource Partnerships’ anti-Cayetano strategies in the last mayor’s race, depended on linking these attack ads to a huge grassroots effort.

But once you cut through the underbrush of these strategies, their essence is that fundamental question: How do likely voters break down by party, and what do we need to do make that work to our advantage?