MANCHESTER, N.H. (AP) – Near the end of a long presidential campaign, the question in this hard-fought state is becoming more familiar: Which candidate do you like? And the reply of 62-year-old independent voter Joy Handyside is perhaps all-too-common.

In her booth at the Puritan Backroom Restaurant, where the chitchat is flavored with politics, she grouses, “I haven’t heard too much good about either one of them.”

There’s a reason why.

Many are characterizing this as one of the most negative campaigns in decades. Attacks on President Bush and Sen. John Kerry make up much of what many voters, in New Hampshire and elsewhere, know about the candidates.

And many don’t like it.

Still, the bare-knuckles style of this campaign may be more complicated than that.

Though offensive tactics can alienate voters toward both sides and the process itself, political scientists say, that’s not all they do. Such tactics also serve a more complex, often positive role in the American political system, say scholars and voters themselves.

Adversarial electioneering has been part of American democracy since its early history. Many voters rely on negative appeals that are based on fact – though that can be hard to judge in a world of skewering sound bites and ads that package many attack lines in a few seconds.

Some voters say these methods highlight differences between candidates and inject passion into bland speechifying.

“It gives you a different viewpoint, and you use your common sense to decide whether to accept it,” said Nick Skaperdas, 74, who was sipping coffee and chewing over politics at the Puritan Backroom.

Every four years, this Manchester restaurant serves as a campaign stop for the leadoff presidential primary in New Hampshire. In this state, where license plates declare “Live Free or Die,” independence is a point of pride. Thirty-eight percent of voters are independent, outnumbering either Republicans or Democrats.

Without partisan domination, New Hampshire politics often adopts a relatively benign tone, but not always.

In this year’s close race for governor, Democratic challenger John Lynch has mocked Republican incumbent Craig Benson and accused him of cronyism. That tone finds echoes in the presidential campaign. With the state barely tilting toward George W. Bush in 2000, this year’s race has poured buckets of negativism into the ears of New Hampshire voters.

“It’s a very competitive race in a highly polarized political environment. That’s a recipe for negativity,” says Darrell West, a Brown University political scientist who studies campaign advertising.

By now, accusations from both sides in the presidential race are familiar.

A group of Vietnam War veterans has accused Kerry of exaggerating his combat record and the atrocities he later reported to Congress. Bush has ridiculed him as a waffler who would coddle the nation’s enemies, largely for his stand on the Iraq war.

Kerry supporters have questioned whether Bush properly fulfilled his National Guard duty as a young man. Kerry depicts the president as deceiving, bullheaded and incompetent in his handling of Iraq and out-of-touch with economic reality.

In early September, more Americans thought Kerry had been unfairly attacked than Bush – 52 percent to 41 percent, according to a Gallup Poll with a 3-point margin of error.

Yet some survey results suggest that Bush did succeed in portraying Kerry as “flip-flopping and not being a strong leader,” according to Frank Newport, the poll’s editor-in-chief.

If so, it came with a price. Many voters have been disgusted with the assaults by both camps.

“They’re talking about Vietnam and National Guard,” grumbles Tom O’Shaughnessy, of Manchester. “Who cares? I don’t care.”

“I want to know who’s going to take care of me in my later years,” adds O’Shaughnessy, who still works part-time as a bank courier at age 68.

If he had lived in the 19th century, the negativity might have been even more striking.

In 1828, Andrew Jackson’s opponents falsely claimed his dead mother was “a common prostitute.”

With his gangly physique and country roots, Abraham Lincoln was publicly called “baboon” and “gorilla.”

In 1884, opponents forced bachelor Grover Cleveland to admit that he was the presumed father of an illegitimate child.

Modern campaign rhetoric is nearly always tamer, even though mass communications carries inflammatory messages across the country in a flash. Kerry shrinks even from calling Bush “a liar,” instead resorting to euphemisms – sometimes tortured ones like “constitutionally incapable of acknowledging the truth.”

“We’ve gotten so prissy about a healthy back-and-forth between two candidates,” says Maxine Isaacs, press secretary for Walter Mondale during his 1984 run against President Ronald Reagan. “I think we’d be so much better off to let them sort of go at it, and let people see the differences.”

Campaigns must take care when they go negative, however. It can grate against social norms that still favor public civility.

“Like my mom said a long time ago, “If you ain’t got something good to say, don’t say nothing at all,”‘ says Gerry Martin, 38, a booking agent from Durham, N.C., explaining why he is irked by negativity.

Attacks can also boomerang. Do they tend to sway Ari Levin, 21, a student at the University of Wisconsin-Madison? “Yes, but not in the way they intend,” he says. “If someone just does negative campaigning, it leads me to believe he has nothing to defend himself with.”

Jonathan Judge, 27, who runs an educational nonprofit group in Denver, says the adversarial tone of the Bush-Kerry race “really soured my taste toward both candidates.”

It may even keep some voters, especially independents, at home on Election Day. One study of the 1992 U.S. Senate races showed that negative campaigning tended to depress turnouts by 3 percent – a huge share in a close race.

Shanto Igengar, a Stanford University researcher who worked on the study, says sponsors of attack ads know they are more likely to take votes from the opponent than win votes to their own side.

Whether they vote or not, many Americans are put off by campaign hardball. In a Gallup Poll in 2000, 54 percent of American adults said campaigns have turned more negative in recent years, while only 8 percent said more positive. Forty-four percent strongly felt negative ads should have no place in campaigns, while just 11 percent strongly felt they should. The findings had a sampling error of 3 percentage points.

If so many voters are annoyed by attack rhetoric – or at least say they are – how can it work?

“They say they don’t like it, they say it makes them less likely to vote, they say it makes them more cynical, but what they say they like isn’t necessarily what they do,” says Deborah Brooks, a Dartmouth College political scientist.

For one thing, an accusatory tone reinforces what many post-Watergate voters already believe. “Citizens say they hate this stuff, but in some ways it plays off their thinking about politicians. They don’t hold them in high repute,” says Thomas Patterson of Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government.

Also, psychological experiments show it’s easier to remember negative traits than positive ones, which helps explain the potency of attack ads.

Attack rhetoric connects best with voters when it is specific, ostensibly relevant, grounded in fact, and within the bounds of good taste, voters and experts agree. Incumbents with longer records provide fatter targets, yet unknown challengers can be easier to characterize.

“If I were … in either of the two camps, I think I’d give them the advice of being as negative as possible, because it works,” says Marc Lendler, who teaches a class on the presidency at Smith College in Northampton, Mass.

Some academics worry that the barrage of negativity in modern campaigns could ultimately weaken the foundations of democracy.

“You want a public that’s skeptical about politicians and the claims they make. When it slips into cynicism – that none of them are trustworthy – I think it starts to break down one of the fundamental elements of democracy,” says Patterson, at Harvard.

However, many see a positive function for most forms of campaign attack.

“Negative campaigning has a very important role in the American democracy: holding candidates responsible for their attitudes and behavior in the past and what they’re planning in the future,” says Brooks, at Dartmouth.

For Larry Nelson, 61, a Manchester salesman lunching at the Puritan, hardball campaigning can inject invigorating emotion into an election.

“If it’s true,” he says, “it’s not negative just because it hurts somebody’s feelings.”

Besides, he says, good campaigns aren’t just about feeling good.

AP-ES-10-17-04 1242EDT