Hello friends, and happy Halloween to all who celebrate. Whether you love the holiday or turn out the lights and hope no one knocks on your door, be grateful if you don’t live on Hanover Street in Richmond, Virginia, where it’s estimated that each home gets about 1,000 trick-or-treaters per hour on Halloween night.

How does the neighborhood pull it off? As described by a local real-estate site, “There’s no committee, no sponsor and no city office running it. ... individual households decide each fall whether to take part ... Everything you see on the night is the total of those private choices.”

Milton Friedman, in other words, would approve. And with that, let’s move on to our story of the week.

Last week, Vox called an ad for Vivek Ramaswamy “the ugliest political ad of 2026.” It’s hard to argue with that.

The ad features the mother of the woman Ramaswamy is running against calling her daughter a liar. “If you think she’ll make your life better, you’re fooling yourself. It will only get worse,” she says.

But the facts quickly got in the way of Donna Arthur’s story. She is, in fact, the biological mother of Amy Acton, but left her children and lost custody when Acton was 12, and stayed married to the man who was indicted and charged with sexually abusing her daughter.

Even without those horrific details, pitting an estranged mother and daughter against each other in a campaign ad is repugnant, and many Republicans expressed shock and outrage.

Ramaswamy, however, dug in and got support from Vice President JD Vance who said, “Politics is a tough business” and that Republicans should “stop whining about an advertisement” and vote on the issues they care about.

Some Republicans might. The bigger problem for Ramaswamy and other GOP candidates in Ohio is that independents might not.

The Cook Political Report, which had deemed the race a toss-up prior to the controversy, now has it “leaning Democrat.” The Cleveland Plain Dealer had stopped endorsing candidates in major races, but came out in support of Acton. So has the Republican who ran against Ramaswamy in the primary.

But as usual, there is nuance being lost in the black-and-white hot takes. Start with how the ad came to light. CNN reported that a video of the ad was recorded by a person who saw it while taking part in a poll. That person then passed it on to a local political blogger, D.J. Byrnes, who shared it online. We don’t know if the campaign actually planned to air the ad or not.

That doesn’t excuse the Ramaswamy campaign for going all in once the video was going viral. But, as Glenn Beck pointed out, the Acton campaign seems to have embraced the controversy. Acton is now seen as a survivor who overcame a traumatic childhood, not a person who can’t be trusted to tell the truth.

It’s not over until it’s over, and one poll has Ramaswamy ahead of Acton by two points. But as Glenn Greenwald wrote on Substack, Ramaswamy could have headed off this problem with three words that are seldom used in politics: We were wrong.

The culture’s prevailing ethos, Greenwald said, “equates apology with weakness, admission of wrongdoing with cowardice, and acknowledgment of error with surrender.” This ethos, he argued, emerged as part of the backlash to cancel culture, when people felt they had to stand strong, proud and unwavering in order to protect their beliefs. But this stance serves no purpose when we’ve actually done something wrong.

Greenwald lauded Dan Hauser, an aide to Utah Sen. Mike Lee, for showing how it’s done.

It’s likely too late for Ramaswamy to reverse course now. Then again, a lot can happen in a few days.

If there’s a particular ad that has bothered you in the past, feel free to tell us about it in the comments section.

The Ramaswamy ad brings to mind other controversial ads of past campaigns. One of the most infamous was the so-called Willie Horton ad devised by legendary GOP strategist Lee Atwater.

Atwater, who died of brain cancer at age 40, managed the campaign of George H.W. Bush, who was running against Michael Dukakis in 1988. As governor of Massachusetts, Dukakis vetoed a bill that would have banned furloughs for people convicted of murder in the first degree, and Atwater used the case of Willie Horton, who committed another brutal crime while on a furlough, as a centerpiece of the Bush campaign. The ad was effective — Bush won despite having been down by 18 points three months before the election — but sparked outrage because of its racist undertones.

Later, as he was dying, Atwater said he regretted the “naked cruelty” of some things he had said, but he still defended his general approach, saying that “what most people call negative campaigning, I prefer to call comparative campaigning.”

Unlike ads that upset viewers because of their sexualized content, political ads that spark outrage most often do so because they are seen as unethical.

Another case in point: the “daisy ad” of 1964, created for Lyndon B. Johnson’s campaign against Barry Goldwater. That ad has been described as a pivotal point in American politics, “ushering in a new era of attack ads and polarization.” It shows a child picking petals off a daisy and counting, then shows a nuclear explosion, as an announcer says to vote for Johnson because “the stakes are too high for you to stay home.”

It became the “most seen commercial and the least aired,” Robert J. Thompson, a professor of television and pop culture at Syracuse University’s Newhouse School of Public Communications, told me, as it aired only once. Suggesting that your opponent would launch a nuclear war was a bridge too far at a time when there was widespread palpable fear that such a war was imminent.

Even six decades later, that ad is the unsettling standard by which other political ads are compared.

Here are five more (two of which are connected to Mitt Romney) that USA Today offered for the Political Ads Hall of Shame. On a scale of 1-10, with 10 being the worst, I’d say “Throw Granny off the Cliff” deserves at least eight daisies.

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Maria Baer and Brad Wilcox take on a provocative question: Who has the most sex, conservatives or liberals? One of the reasons might surprise you.

“Liberals spend more time on social media than conservatives, so progressive men and women are more likely to encounter the polarizing, controversy stirring content that keeps the platforms churning. The “gender wars,” hot-take battles between far-right misogynists and far-left radical feminists, may keep people scrolling. But they can be poison for real relationships."

The truth about conservatives and sex

As Canada walks back a controversial plan to expand medical aid in dying, Naomi Schaefer Riley looks at a new book that follows a family with a gene that gives them a 50-50 chance of developing dementia.

“Interestingly, even knowing what their future would look like, the siblings who found out they had the genetic mutation did not choose suicide or even leave instructions about ending their lives. There are a few stray comments, but nothing serious. (The author) finds this notable. Why not?”

What ‘The Vanishing Family’ teaches us about the worth of a life

In last week’s Right to the Point subscriber poll, we considered whether a strong showing by independents in the midterm elections would hurt Republicans or Democrats the most.

The GOP better hope the independents stay home.

Finally, the most contentious issue of our time seems to not be immigration or Iran, but whether we should be changing our clocks on Sunday. A local business near me has the owner’s opinion posted outside on a sign, which seems a dangerous provocation if you’re trying to solicit new business. (His opinion also happens to be the opposite of mine.)

Which leads to my yearly reminder that falling back is a choice. The government is not going to show up to see if you’ve changed your analog clocks. It’s entirely possible to ignore the time on your phone and keep chugging along on Daylight Saving Time, at least in terms of what time you get up and go to bed. And who among us can’t use an extra quiet hour in the morning?

As always, thank you for reading and being a part of the Right to the Point community. Feel free to reach out at any time with ideas and comments: [email protected] or via direct message on X at @grahamtoday.

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