YOUNGSTOWN, Ohio - They seem to get nastier and appear more often every election year.

And they're one of the oldest strategies in the political playbook.

"The first negative ads didn't start in Trump's election or Obama's election, they started in the election of 1800 between Thomas Jefferson and John Adams," says Dr. Caleb Verbois, associate professor of political science at Grove City College. "Both candidates' campaigns called each other very nasty things, mostly in anonymous op-ed pieces."

But while those negative ads may be steeped in history, the bottom line is they're effective - but why?

"Everybody potentially, to an extent, can win in the marketplace - Lowe's and Home Depot can co-exist, but one party or the other, one candidate or the other, is going to win the governorship," says Jeff Hedrich of The Prodigal Company, a Boardman advertising firm.

Vindicator politics writer David Skolnick says attack ads ramp up when a race is very close - like the Ohio governor's race between Mike DeWine and Rich Cordray; but Skolnick says an attack ad's success is dependent mostly on one thing - the truth.

And one of DeWine's about untested rape kits has some holes.

"I don't know how effective it really is because it's actually been ruled by independent media organizations as not being accurate," Skolnick says.

Those details are ones that one particular and much-sought-after block of voters will be paying attention to.

"If you're an undecided voter, I think they sometimes have more sway than on someone who's already decided what they're doing," says Skolnick.