It's on TV, nearly every street you drive by, in your inbox, and even calling you at home: political ads.
"I'm sick of it, really I am," Iowa Voter Ramon Henderson says, "It's too much, you should have an ad or two, saying what you want, how you want things changed, and that's it, shouldn't be so much bad-mouthing."
The amount of money spent on political ads this year alone is something the QCA has never seen before. In 2004, John Kerry and George Bush faced off in a presidential race, and campaigns spent about $12 million running ads in the QCA market.
In the next election in 2008 between Barack Obama and John McCain, only $5.5 million was spent on ads in our area. This year, it's smashing records. In a presidential race between President Obama and Mitt Romney, campaigns are spending nearly $30 million running political ads here, more than double anything we've seen in the past.
Campaigns are spending more than ever getting their message out to voters, and we're noticing it too.
"We're in an alternative universe, we've never, this is an unprecedented amount of political dollars that are coming in," KWQC General Manager Ken Freedman says, "Iowa's six electoral votes could decide who's going to sit in the White House and that's why they're spending so much money here."
But just because campaigns are spending big dollars on them, doesn't always mean they're 100 percent true.
"The FCC and Congress tells us what we can and can't do," Freedman says, "If you're a legal candidate, you can say anything you want in your commercials, and we can't do anything about that."
"Some of those commercials stretch the truth a little bit and some of them stretch the truth a lot," Freedman says, "I believe we should all be taking everything we're seeing at this point with a grain of salt."
